How Mobile Apps for Grocery Shopping Are Set to Change the Foraging Experience

Mobile Apps for Grocery Shopping

Grocery shopping seems like an activity that would evade the efficiencies brought by mobile technology.  Grocers, greengrocers and butchers were agglomerating and mutating into “supermarkets” even in the late 1920s. And while supermarkets have gotten bigger – as our homes, suburbs and shopping centers have attained new degrees of enormity – they have remained essentially unchanged since that time.  For most Americans, the foraging process is the same as it was for their great-great-grandparents.

Mobile apps for grocery shopping are set to change all that.

People have been tinkering with the grocery shopping experience since supermarkets began to line America’s streets and anchor its shopping centers.  To date, however, the success of these experiments and innovations could be generously described as “spotty.”  Webvan, an online “credit and delivery” grocery business that was headquartered – of course – near Silicon Valley that offered grocery delivery services to customers in a number of US markets, is notable only for the scale of its failure; in June 2008, CNET named it the “largest dot-com flop in history.”  It beat the infamous Pets.com to achieve this less-than-glorious distinction.

While most supermarkets provide some sort of online shopping service, there are a few stores using mobile apps for grocery shopping.  They are showing us how businesses in every market can creatively employ mobile.

Longo’s Grocery Gateway

We have only discussed the grocery shopping experience encountered by those of in the United States, but rest assured that dissatisfaction with that experience extends across borders, cultures and language.  Even the Canadians, endlessly patient and pleasant as they are, are using mobile to make grocery shopping a little less onerous.

The Canadian supermarket chain, Longo’s Fruit Markets, recently announced that it will be releasing a slew of mobile applications to improve the online shopping experience provided by its Grocery Gateway website.

Longo’s new apps let shoppers order groceries suing a Grocery Gateway iPhone app or mobile web app.  This is, according to the company’s representatives, the first Canadian mobile app that supports grocery ordering and delivery, allows shoppers to view items they previously purchased, and enables shoppers to check-out securely using any credit card.

Longo’s director of CRM said, Ken Kuschei, said that “The implementation of our mobile applications brings a new level of service and convenience to our customers across the devices they take wherever they go.”

Longo’s new apps do more than help its customers, although that wouldn’t be an inconsiderable achievement.  The company’s new mobile apps for grocery shopping enable the company to send targeted offers to its previous customers, and that helps it interact with its loyalists outside of its stores.

Peapod and Giant Foods Join Forces in Providing Mobile Apps for Grocery Shopping

This year, Peapod, a grocery home delivery company, and Giant Foods, a supermarket chain serving the Mid-Atlantic states, merged their mobile scanning and online purchasing tools in order to mount an ad campaign in Philadelphia.  The companies put up billboard ads at commuter rail and bus stops featuring photographs of popular items, as well as QR-style barcodes.  Commuters could scan the items using their smartphones and easily arrange for them to be delivered to their homes or other locations.

The campaign was blissfully simple and it was also a success.  And so Peapod decided to repeat it on a more ambitious level.  The company opened a virtual grocery store in an unused subway tunnel in Chicago.  Rather than just providing commuters with photos of a few very popular items, Peapod basically installed a fully-stocked store in the tunnel.  Once again, the company provided commuters with images of their products, as well as accompanying QR codes.  Once again, the initiative was a success.

Transforming the Grocery Shopping Experience

Peapod’s online store might provide the only fully mobile grocery shopping experience in the United States – and it is admirable in both its audacity and its creativity.  It removes time-consuming tasks like going to the grocery store and packing and unpacking items.

Mobile apps for grocery shopping are going to transform a banal activity few of us relish into something that we can do while we are sitting in traffic, taking public transit, or just watching television.  As it has done in other spheres, mobile is going to make a time-consuming activity and, if not make it enjoyable, at least make it comparatively efficient.

Source: Global Mobile HQ (http://goo.gl/06aG8)