The Friday Checkout is a weekly column providing more insight on the news, rounding up the announcements you may have missed and sharing what’s to come.
More than two years after Kroger and Albertsons shocked the world with their audacious plan to fuse into a supermarket juggernaut, the fight over the controversial merger has reached its crescendo. Attorneys for the grocers and the states of Colorado and Washington delivered their closing arguments this week following a pair of dramatic court battles — underscoring the enormous divide between the retailers and their opponents.
No matter what happens next, the grocers’ lawyers have left no stone unturned in their bid to forever tie the merger to what they have described as a single-minded commitment to helping shoppers save money. That sentiment permeated the companies' federal court showdown in Portland, Oregon, reverberated in Seattle on Wednesday and continued to echo in Colorado on Thursday.
While legal challenges to the deal have centered on the competition between the two supermarket chains, Kroger and Albertsons have pushed a more expansive, existential view of a fragmenting industry in which competition against Costco, Walmart and Amazon must be considered.
Speaking Thursday in a Denver courtroom, Kroger attorney Matt Wolf said the company faces unrelenting competition from Walmart and needs to combine with Albertsons to find more savings to pass on to shoppers. But Arthur Biller, of the Colorado attorney general’s office, said Kroger has incorrectly described the competition it faces to push through a merger that would be anticompetitive “no matter how you look at it.”
The attorneys also presented starkly different interpretations over the fitness of C&S Wholesale Grocers to serve as a check on Kroger and Albertsons' market power if they were to come together. Biller said C&S lacks the scale to run a competitive supermarket business and cast it as interested in buying retail stores only to feed its wholesale operations. Wolf said C&S has national reach and is strongly qualified to take on the assets Kroger and Albertsons have proposed divesting.
In case you missed it
Kroger’s new food healthfulness score initiative
This week, Kroger and Bitewell announced their partnership to help consumers better understand product nutrition. Bitewell said that its FoodHealth Score, which uses a 1 to 100 rating scale based on nutrient density, ingredient quality and shoppers’ personal dietary goals, will be available across nearly all products at all Kroger stores.
New tech coming to Giant Eagle distribution centers
The grocer has transitioned three of its facilities to a warehouse management solution from Manhattan Associates Inc., with plans to bring the solution to its remaining four distribution centers by next summer. The solution aims to improve operational efficiency, reduce order cycle times and deliver more seamless service to stores and customers.
Manhattan said Giant Eagle recently added its Manhattan Active Transportation Management for its logistics operations. Combining this with the new warehouse management system will let Giant Eagle optimize distribution, transportation, labor and automation within a single, cloud-native application, the company noted.
Cheese, please!
Whole Foods Market announced Thursday it has added 40 workers to its growing cohort of Certified Cheese Professionals — the wine sommelier certification equivalent for cheese. The grocery chain, which has focused on becoming a specialty cheese destination, claims it is the “leading global employer of CCPs” with more than 370 of its workers accounting for the more than 1,000 CCPs worldwide.
Impulse find
Cool AI tech spotted
What if artificial intelligence could answer all your meal-planning questions?
Payman Nejati, co-founder and CEO at Ownit AI, posted on LinkedIn this week a video showing a deployment of AI capabilities across Safeway’s website that aims to do just that.
The deployment included features like AI-powered search, recommendations, filters, review summaries, personalizations, live Q&As and FAQs. After a query for “quick easy dinner ideas for vegetarians,” a shopper could see AI-augmented results with product suggestions under subheadings like “Vegetarian Microwave Meals” and “Quick Vegetarian Indian Dishes.”
The AI can also summarize customer reviews to address the question asked and create a curated shelf with suggested products. On product pages, people can see AI-generated copy explaining why someone would buy this item to fulfill their desired meal requirement. There’s an “Ask anything about this product” AI search box where customers can get specific product info as well as ask for product comparisons.
While it’s unclear if or when then this technology will go live on Safeway’s website, the technology demo is worth watching.
