The Grocery Retailers Growing Fastest Aren't Just Investing in Technology. They're Connecting It.

The Biggest Growth Opportunity in Grocery Is Already in Your Store

Grocery retail is at an inflection point between traditional in-store sales and omnichannel ecosystems. Consumers have already made the shift — they move fluidly between online and in-store, often within the same shopping trip. They expect the experience to move with them.

For grocery retailers adapting to the new expectations, the stakes are high. Omnichannel shoppers have 93% greater lifetime value than customers who only shop in-store. Winning — and keeping — those customers is one of the most significant growth levers available to grocery retailers today. Three quarters of consumers say they'll switch retailers if they don't receive personalized interactions — yet only 29% of grocers describe their omnichannel strategy as advanced , and nearly half of retail CIOs report that at least one critical digital initiative has underperformed expectations.¹

And it's why 62% of grocers expect their technology budgets to increase in 2026, a 17-point jump from the year before.¹ The opportunity is real and the investment is flowing. But spend alone doesn't close the gap.The question is whether that investment is being directed in a way that actually delivers — for store teams, and for the customers grocers are working so hard to keep.

Disconnected systems, disconnected results

Faced with the pressure to compete digitally, grocers have effectively been pushed into building technical capabilities outside of their standard expertise and operations. The choice in front of them: 

• Build in-house, and you control the output — but you're betting heavily on engineering resources and committing to a steep, ongoing innovation curve. 

• Buy off-the-shelf, and you move faster — but most commercial platforms weren't designed for grocery's structural complexity.

In a recent study,² Instacart asked grocery retail leaders for their views on this challenge. As one ecommerce lead at a major grocery cooperative put it: "These ecommerce systems were never built for grocery retail — they're built for electronics. Weighted goods, perishables, substitution logic — none of it works."

Neither path, on its own, tends to deliver what retailers — or their customers — actually need. And when retailers mix both, stitching together in-house builds with third-party tools, they pay what's known as the integration tax: the compounding cost of getting disconnected systems to talk to each other.

One ecommerce lead at a top-5 European grocer put it simply: "I pay the guy to integrate, then I pay a second time for the bugs."

The result is fragmentation — and fragmentation has a downstream cost that goes beyond operational headaches. Disconnected systems produce disconnected data, and disconnected data is increasingly a strategic liability. As Gartner has noted, fragmented data is the single biggest blocker to scalable AI in retail. In a sector where the competitive advantage is increasingly won or lost on personalization, prediction, and real-time decision-making, that's not a plumbing problem. It's a growth problem.

Transformation is a progression, not a leap

Grocery retailers don't transform overnight. The path from a basic digital presence to a fully connected, AI-powered operation runs through distinct stages — each one building on the last. Understanding where you are on that digital maturity curve matters because it shapes what's possible: what your teams can do, what your customers experience, and how efficiently your business runs.

At a high level, there are four stages on the digital maturity curve: 

1. Digital Foundation: This is where most retailers start. Customers can order online, either through your website or a third-party delivery system. But behind the scenes, the digital operation largely runs on top of the physical one — separate systems, manual updates, and a lot of team effort to keep it functioning. For shoppers, the experience is functional but friction-filled: it gets the job done, but it doesn't build loyalty.

2. Scaling Integration: This is where the real shift begins. Online and in-store stop being two different businesses and start behaving like one. For store teams, this means more reliable tools and systems that introduce efficiency. For customers, it means the experience finally feels coherent: the sale they saw online is the sale they find in store. 

3. Optimization & Automation. At this stage, routine decisions — replenishment signals, fulfillment routing, promotional targeting — are informed by technology rather than slow, manual processes. Retail media stops being a passive banner business and becomes a targeted, performance-driven revenue stream. And for customers, something starts to feel different: the experience starts to feel less like searching and more like being understood.

4. Tech-enabled intelligence. At the fastest-growing edge of the curve, retailers have AI working across their entire operation: anticipating demand and surfacing insights before a problem surfaces or an opportunity passes. For store teams, the shift is meaningful — smart carts and digitized processes reduce the manual labor load, redirecting people toward higher-value work. For customers, the experience approaches something close to magical: the right product, the right promotion, the right moment — without them having to think about it.

The Growth Case for Digital Maturity

There is evidence to support that being further along in digital maturity is associated with faster growth. To understand the relationship between digital maturity and business performance, we mapped 23 grocery retailers across the four stages of the digital maturity curve — then compared actual results between the less-mature group and the more-mature group across three KPIs: online sales growth, in-store sales growth, and omnichannel share of wallet.

The more digitally mature retailers outperformed across the board. They saw 6 percentage points higher omnichannel grocery share of wallet, 4 percentage points higher in-store sales growth, and 6 percentage points higher online sales growth.⁴

That last finding is the one worth sitting with. Digital maturity isn't just an ecommerce play. Retailers who invested in connecting and automating their operations didn't just win online — they grew faster in-store too. Better data informed better decisions. Better decisions drove better customer experiences. And better customer experiences built the kind of loyalty that shows up in share of wallet.

Instacart Enterprise: Built for Grocery, Built to Connect

The challenge with point-solutions is that they operate in isolation. The real opportunity for growth comes from each solution working together. For example, a grocer running commerce and media on the same platform doesn’t just save on integration costs — they unlock targeting, measurement, and AI capabilities that point solutions can’t replicate.

The Instacart Enterprise platform is a suite of interconnected hardware and software specifically built for grocery.  Retailers partnering with Instacart benefit from over 14 years of  proven infrastructure and intelligence that has already powered 1.6 billion lifetime orders, while retaining control of their brand, data and customer relationships. 

And they can use this proven tech and expertise to progress through the stages of digital maturity on an integrated tech stack with flexible solutions across ecommerce, in-store technology, retail media and AI.   

Change the equation with the right partner

Top grocery retailers are investing strategically — driving growth, serving their customers better, and unlocking new revenue streams through more connected, coherent technology. And the retailers making this move aren't outliers – they include global operators, major regional banners, and independent co-ops.

Recent partnership announcements reflect the breadth of that momentum. ALDI U.S. moved from an in-house ecommerce build to Instacart's platform. Costco launched its first-ever international same-day grocery ordering in France and Spain. Allegiance Retail Services, Kroger, Sprouts, and ShopRite are all investing in connected grocery technology — and doing it with the same platform.

For a growing number of retailers around the world, Instacart Enterprise platform is a partner that can provide a connected, grocery-native solution that grows with them.

Learn more about the Instacart Enterprise platform → instacart.com/company/enterprise-platform

^Sources

^{1 Progressive Grocer. (2026). Progressive Grocers Annual Report.}

^{2 Instacart. (Q3 2025). European grocery research.} 

^{3 Gartner. (2026). Top Retail Trends for CIOs in 2026: Accelerating Retail Modernization and AI-Driven Growth}

^{4 Third party data: Results based on difference in median of metrics between retailers with lower digital maturity vs. retailers with higher digital maturity based on their use of technology (not exclusive to Instacart technology). Online and in-store sales growth based on difference between 2024 and 2025. Share of wallet based on average user omnichannel share of wallet among grocery retailers in 2025. Prior results do not guarantee future outcomes.}