EXCLUSIVE: How Albertsons created its omnichannel experience

Albertsons Companies seamlessly bridges its in-store and digital shopping environments with a customer-centric focus.

At the recent eTail Boston 2024 conference, I had the opportunity to conduct a fireside chat Q&A with Jatin Pahuja, group VP of app and webs, Albertsons Companies, to discuss how the grocery giant has been able to successfully bridge in-store and digital omnichannel experiences within a few short years. 

Boise-based Albertsons operates more than 2,200 retail food and drug stores facilities across 34 states and the District of Columbia under more than 20 banners. Albertsons is in the midst of legal wranglings regarding a proposed $25 billion merger with fellow grocery giant The Kroger Co. Kroger recently filed a motion for a preliminary injunction against a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) challenge to the merger proposal.

This article is taken directly from the conversation at eTail Boston 2024, with edits for length and clarity.

When you are building a best-in-class digital presence from scratch, where do you start?

Albertsons started with a simple framework consisting of four concentric circles. The first one is, of course, the customer. You always start with the customer. The second one is, where are you today in terms of your current capabilities as well as your current company standing? 

The third circle is what are you passionate about, where you ultimately want to go and what do you want to achieve? And fourth, but not least important, circle is the need to create a sustainable business. 

The opportunity lies at the intersection of these four concentric circles- unmet customer need, expertise, vision and business model. At Albertsons, once we found that intersection, we translated that into a clear digital experience that incorporated evolving themes and pushed the art of the possible.

What were some of the specific themes Albertsons incorporated in your digital experience initiative? 

First, we wanted to understand how technology is evolving, how customer needs might be changing, and about emerging competitive threats. Once you have a good viewpoint of how the world is evolving, you can select the themes that you want to incorporate - but the key to selecting is to ensure that those themes add value in the customer journey..

For example, at the first step of the customer journey as the customer comes to your app or site, it was important to have a seamless and secure registration process. So we moved away from things like passwords in 2021, and created a much simpler, secure text-based sign-in experience. 

Then, as you go further down in the customer journey, you need to think about how you can ensure an engaging discovery process for customers to find the right items. For that, we leverage data science and personalization to understand what customers are buying online and in the store so we can surface the right items for them at the appropriate times on their shopping journey.

Albertsons continues to see customers do most of their shopping in the stores. Omnichannel is another very important theme, helping in-store customers understand the value of our digital offering was critical and we bridged that gap by enabling customers to intermingle shopping online and in-store, and pick up where they left off in the other channel.

Another important theme is emerging around customers increasingly purchasing grocery items as ingredients of larger meal plans for their family, rather than as separate, individual products. We are building an experience which is more focused on planning meals and getting the necessary ingredients, rather than specifically about just buying one item at a time. 

[READ MORE: Albertsons integrates with shoppable recipe platform]