Supermarket/Grocery

London - J Sainsbury PLC is increasing transportation productivity through enhanced accuracy. Sixteen Sainsbury’s depots are using an integrated transport management system from Paragon Software, which integrates Paragon’s planning optimization with wireless communications to enhance the accuracy and execution of each day's complex transport plans.

Meijer has partnered with Scotts-MiracleGro to create an unprecedented lawn and garden section in its stores, just in time for the spring gardening season. 

Meijer is the first supercenter to partner with the national lawn care and garden brand to create a Garden Marketplace inside 27 Meijer stores across the Midwest as peak gardening season begins.

The old expression, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,” was taken to heart at Whole Foods where a recent fundraising campaign will provide loans to help people improve their lot in life.

Whole Food held concerts and craft fairs and thousands of small events that raised $4.6 million with the goal of alleviating global poverty. To achieve such a lofty mission, the retailer isn’t donating money to food banks to provide hand outs, but rather using the dollars to fund a microlending campaign.

King of Prussia, Pa. - Retailers anticipate accelerated growth for 2015. According to a study from eBay Enterprise, an eBay Inc. company, 72% of more than 1,000 online retailers surveyed anticipate online revenue to increase by 17% in 2015.

Confidence in commerce infrastructure is also high, with 95% of respondents stating they are very or somewhat confident their e-commerce experience meets consumers’ needs and expectations.

Montreal – Canadian grocery retailer Metro Inc. is interested in purchasing some of the 133 Canadian stores Target Corp. finished closing earlier this month. In an April 22 conference call with investors, Metro said the possibility exists that it will try to purchase certain former Target stores.

"There are a few of those stores that could be of interest to us down the road if they become available," Eric La Fleche, CEO of Metro, said during the call.

Seattle - While Amazon is winning the battle for smartphone shoppers in America, it has yet to achieve the same dominance in at least 10 other countries internationally. This is the key finding of a monthly report from Informate Mobile Intelligence that tracked and measured consumer use of smartphones in 12 countries during February 2015.

The new report reveals shopping apps as having the highest penetration in the U.S. at 60%, followed by India at 46%. The other 10 countries measured, by comparison, only had a median reach of about 18%.

What’s wrong with the retail Industry? Corporate Responsibility Magazine is out with the 2015 version of its 100 Best Corporate Citizens and only three, that’s right, only three retailers were worthy of inclusion on the list.

Whole Foods celebrated Earth Day by serving as the kickoff site for environmental activist Christopher Swain’s historic swim in a toxic canal.

With more than 1,000 stores in the Southeast, Publix Super Markets celebrated Earth Day with a $160,000 effort to make shrimp aquaculture more sustainable.

The grocery chain says it is focused on improving the conditions associated with shrimp aquaculture. The donation to the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership will fund research to improve fisheries and help shrimp aquaculture in southeast Asia become more sustainable.

The IRI Summit 2015 conference this week in Austin is helping senior manufacturers and retailers find growth in CPG manufacturing, retail and health care.

The program highlights strategies for finding growth opportunities with shoppers via cutting-edge content and analytics, technologies and retail best practices.