Data & Analytics

New York -- An investigation of Whole Foods Market stores in New York City has found systemic overcharging of its customers for prepackaged food.

The city's Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) said some Whole Foods stores routinely overstated the weights of its pre-packaged products – including meats, dairy and baked goods – resulting in customers being overcharged. DCA tested packages of 80 different types of pre-packaged products and found all of the products had packages with mislabeled weights.

New York -- The combination of Royal Ahold and Delhaize Groupe creates a new super-regional chain along the Eastern Seaboard that will serve 50 million customers weekly and generate annual sales of more than $60 billion.

The merger announcement was highly anticipated following months of speculation followed by confirmation of talks between the companies. Now that the merger agreement has been reached, Ahold and Delhaize said they expect the deal to close by mid-2016.

Shoppers in need of same-day delivery of Thai oyster sauce or Indonesian soy sauce may not have to leave their homes to buy the ingredients if Instacart has any say about it.

The online grocery delivery service based in San Francisco announced Wednesday that it would begin delivering to Boston and Cambridge residents from H Mart, one of the largest and fastest growing Asian grocery chains in the United States.

North Plainfield, N. J. -- Nearly one-third (31.1% ) of retailers report that their companies have opened or will open new stores this year, according to a survey by retail real estate management firm Levin Management. It is the highest mid-year percentage in the four years for which comparative Levin survey data is available.

Redwood Shores, Calif. – Amazon just obtained a new competitor for its Amazon Web Services cloud hosting and development platform. Oracle is going head-to-head with Amazon with a slew of more than 24 new additions to the Oracle Cloud Platform.

Oracle’s new integrated cloud services include infrastructure, platform and software delivered as a service. Specific cloud-based services include hosted Exadata-based production databases, archive storage, Big Data, enterprise mobility, and application integration.

Digital media company Catalina is launching a new solution that personalizes the deals found in weekly retail ad circulars. 

The program, called My Favorite Deals, is designed to increase ROI in a major area of marketing spend for U.S. retailers.

While 2014 was rocky for a great many retailers, with several thousand store closings across most categories of retail, the first half of 2015 has seen some encouraging signs of a modest resurgence in certain retail sectors and from select brands. The higher numbers of store closings are far from over, and it would not be accurate to refer to 2015 as a total turnaround, but it does seem noteworthy that there are significant categories of retail that have aggressively moved to capitalize on opportunities.

CAMP HILL, Pa. — Rite Aid announced on Wednesday that it has completed its previously announced acquisition of Envision Pharmaceutical Services from global private investment firm TPG and other shareholders. The transaction is valued at approximately $2 billion, including approximately $1.8 billion in cash and approximately 27.9 million Rite Aid shares.