In less than three months’ time, over 5,000 grocery and CPG executives, and the businesses that serve them, will gather in Las Vegas, NV for Groceryshop 2025, the world’s leading event for innovation and digital transformation in the grocery sector.

We’ve built the show this year around the key themes our community of industry leaders tells us are currently top of mind, and as preparation for the show accelerates, the story is becoming clearer. Our aim is to answer the very biggest questions in global grocery innovation.

For branded manufacturers, the question couldn’t be clearer; how to grow volume. Across developed grocery markets, many CPGs have recently delivered growth through price inflation, a lever that is increasingly unavailable. Volume challenges are being pushed further as shoppers move to private label lines, and private label focused retailers.

The solution lies in demand creation, and here the focus needs to be on digital influence. Whilst the point of purchase still remains physical in the majority of grocery transactions, for many retailers and brands the points of influence, of critical demand creation, are increasingly digital.

At Shoptalk Europe, in Barcelona last month, I interviewed Mars Wrigley’s European President Marc Carena on the Keynote stage, and he captured their approach to driving volume as the need to drive both “mental and physical availability”.

Many consumer brands are well-oiled machines at driving physical availability (points of distribution), so what does driving mental availability mean in an age of digital influencing? Two main implications have emerged;

Media Investment Allocation – During my interview at Shoptalk Europe with Jordi Bosch Argilagós, Nestlé’s Global Head of Sales and Customers, he shared that over 70% of Nestlé’s media investment is already digital, as “data unlocks personalization and personalization drives better shopping experiences and better ROI”.

Marc Carena shared that Mars Snacking has more than doubled media investment over the last five years and switched the mix heavily in favour of digital (to a similar level as Nestle shared above). Going further, Marc outlined the Mars strategy to increase reach and engagement by investing in “Earned” and “Shared” media channels, over “Paid” media.

Social Commerce – Digital media investment is typically focused on three areas; Search, Social and Retail Media. And whilst Retail Media is the fastest growing, Social has overtaken Search to be largest category in some European markets.

Social platforms are also growing in importance as commerce platforms, and the latest EMARKETER data highlights that nearly 20% of shoppers in the five largest European countries made a purchase directly from social media last year.

In his Track Keynote at Shoptalk Europe, Mark Elkins, General Manager for Global ecommerce at L’Oréal, shared his learnings on social commerce, especially on TikTok and Douyin. He stressed the importance of authenticity, of providing advice, of creating emotional experiences whilst also offering convenience, and of reviews.

We look forward to continuing this conversation at Groceryshop 2025, as part of our extensive content programme. Over 150 speakers will take to our stages across the three days of the show, and each speaker is hand-picked by our editorial team. There a no sponsors or pay-to-play sessions in the core content programme.

Speakers addressing these questions at Groceryshop 2025 include Priya Nair, President, Beauty & Wellbeing at Unilever; Neil Reynolds, Global Chief Customer & Digital Commerce Officer at Mars Wrigley, and Linda Bethea, CMO North America at Danone.

For grocery retailers, the key question is how to continue to drive efficiency in their operations, whilst also creating engaging and inspiring places to shop.

Chain grocery retailers are process machines, where wafer-thin margins are built through scale. Finding new efficiencies is always though, and at Groceryshop we feature the new technologies being utilised by retailers, and their learnings.

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The latest year-end data from CB Insights demonstrates a significant uptick in funding flowing into technology companies focused on in-store tech. Key areas of investment, for both retailers and investors, include:

• Inventory management and visibility tools – which is especially important as inventory levels rise in response to supply chain disruption being caused in categories exposed to tariff uncertainty
• Labour scheduling and optimisation tools
• and Ecommerce order fulfilment and returns management

In recent months, we can add Agentic AI tools to this list. We see Agentic AI as a form of Artificial Intelligence that uses foundational models to operate autonomously, utilising step-by-step reasoning with access to data and tools so the agent can take action.

Whilst it is really early days in terms of use cases, the potential to automate processes and drive efficiencies in grocery retail is significant. At Groceryshop 2025, we’re running a series of “Test Kitchens”, small group practical session that dig into specific use-cases and share learnings of bringing AI into your organisation, from preparing your tech stack to product recommendations and SEO strategies.

The pursuit of efficiencies cannot, though, come at the expense of creating store formats that are exciting and engaging for shoppers. The two are not mutually exclusive, and disrupting shoppers from “sleep shopping”, as Tesco shared at Shoptalk Europe, is a key priority.

Groceryshop 2025 will feature keynotes and detailed track conversations unpicking this exact topic, with speakers including Tom Ward, EVD COO at Sam’s Club, Jack Sinclair the CEO of Sprouts Farmers Markets, Jole Rampoldt who runs Lidl US and Oliver Vogt, CEO of Transcend at Tesco.

Straddling both these key questions sits the third major factor currently shaping relationships between grocery retailers and their suppliers globally, the evolving role of Retail Media.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that retail media is evolving along two distinct tracks. The first focuses on promoting results in the search results on retailer owned digital properties, and then helping drive conversion on site to create closed-loop attribution.

It’s the core of Amazon’s retail media business, and relies of a number of criteria to be successful; significant online traffic; a very large product catalogue that’s hard to navigate via a primary nav (especially unlocked through a Marketplace); and consistent unified data to demonstrate the return on investment.

For many grocers, these conditions are not strong. So instead, they are prioritising routes to grow media revenues that maximise their unique strength, the footfall to their physical stores.

In this context, creating the environment from closed-loop attribution is very challenging, and requires CapEx. It requires the ability to identify shoppers at the start, rather than end, of their shopping journeys, and digital tools to be able to serve tailored and specific advertising content, for example of a smart-cart or App on a smartphone.

Many grocery retailers are therefore turning their focus on how to provide full-funnel campaigns that link brand-building opportunities with at-fixture conversion tools.

Exploring how these two increasingly diverging Retail Media models are developing will be a third key topic at Groceryshop 2025, where speakers will include retail media networks from Ahold Delhaize, Kroger and Walgreens, and advertiser perspectives from Ferrero, The Coca-Cola Company and Mondelez.

Groceryshop 2025 runs from September 28^th to October 1^st at the Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, and provides a unique meeting place for retailers, CPG brands, technology companies and consultancies. Tickets are on sale now, and retailers and consumer brands can apply to attend for free through our Hosted programme, with support towards travel expenses to get to Vegas here