Grocery Innovation Opportunites

The grocery industry is maintaining a stagnant, or minute, growth status which means that there is not much extra room for improvement. If there was one area that had to use some innovation, it could be the online experience for each company. I think each store has the basic layout figured out to increase the customers’ satisfaction of their experience inside the store. The new question is what if people don’t like the hassle of shopping or don’t know their plan of attacking their grocery list before even entering? Would it not make it easier on the shopper if they knew exactly where to go to get exactly the foods they were looking for? This is where the innovation comes into play. In my opinion, companies should do one or both of the following options. They should (1) devise an online shopping center to allow customers to pick out the foods they desire and have their food delivered to them and/or (2) create an online site where the shopper could type in their list, specify exactly which brands of food they want, and the computer could automatically develop a route on a map of the store to show the customer what the quickest, easiest path to take to get in and out of the store as fast as possible. For those lazy people who do not even enjoy getting out of their couches and going to the store to shop, they should be given an alternative option to have their food delivered to them. If there were an extra charge for assorting the foods and having them delivered that same day, this could turn out to be profitable for the company if it turned out that people were actually this indolent. If they were not as lethargic as described, the excursion through the store should at least be made easier for the customer. After they were able to find their exact brand of each particular food item on their list on the store website program, it should formulate a specific route the customer can take through the store to be able to pick up every single item with the least amount of disturbances and in the shortest amount of time. Then all they would have to do is print out this map and their shopping experience would be a breeze. This would only encourage customers to shop at the grocery store because they know that it will be simple, fast, and less hectic because everything they need to retrieve is already planned out for them on their paper. This easy addition to a company could be a huge breakthrough in the innovation of the grocery industry.