Wegmans tests smart carts
Wegmans is testing smart carts from two providers at four stores in Upstate New York, the grocer told Grocery Dive in an email. The test at Wegmans Dewitt store in Syracuse is of Instacart's smart carts, marking the grocer's first deployment of Caper Carts, the grocery technology company said in a Tuesday announcement.Wegmans also confirmed that it is upgrading its self-checkout technology as part of a "company-wide refresh cycle aimed at maintaining the most convenient checkout experience."
Dive Insight:
Wegmans began piloting smart carts years ago and is continuing to test this type of shopping and checkout solution as it evolves its in-store experience.
Instacart said in the Tuesday announcement that its Caper Carts let customers track their spending in real time, log into their grocer's loyalty program account, bag as they shop and pay directly from the cart. The Wegmans Dewitt store in Syracuse is the only location offering Caper Carts, Instacart confirmed in an email.
The carts use a combination of cameras, sensors and a digital scale to recognize items and are part of Instacart Connected Stores, a suite of technologies linking online and in-store experiences.
Instacart noted that it first partnered with Wegmans in 2017 on same-day delivery and has since expanded the collaboration to include solutions like pickup, EBT SNAP acceptance and loyalty integration.
Instacart said it does not have additional updates to share about whether it will add Caper Carts to more Wegmans stores. The grocer has over 100 stores across eight states and Washington, D.C.
Wegmans is also testing smart carts at two stores in the Rochester, New York, area and one store in the greater Buffalo, New York, area, the grocer said in the email.
"We are limiting the program to these stores as we gather customer feedback to drive improvements," Wegmans said in an emailed statement. "Our goal is to determine if Smart Cart Technology is a fit for the unique shopping assortment offered in our stores and if it meets the shopping needs of our customers."
Self-checkout is another area where the grocer is looking to streamline its checkout experience.
"Many of our stores already have the new self-checkouts and others will be gradually upgraded," the grocer said in the email.
The new machines do not accept cash, have an upgraded processing power and feature a new light pole to signal availability to consumers, according to the Democrat and Chronicle, a newspaper serving the Rochester market.
Wegmans has adjusted and tested checkout technology over the last several years. Last fall, the grocer piloted smart carts at three stores, including Perinton and Pittsford in New York, where the grocer confirmed it is currently testing smart carts, the Democrat & Chronicle reported. In 2023, Wegmans started testing smart cart technology from Shopic at two stores.
The year prior, the grocer ended its popular scan-and-go option due to unspecified "losses."
Meanwhile, Instacart has continually added features to its smart carts as it looks to make the shopping and checkout solution available at more of its retail partners. Recently, Instacart has launched shoppable displays and started testing online delivery offers for customers checking out on the smart carts. The company said in October that it had equipped the carts with technology from NVIDIA's Jetson platform to better recognize items in real-time with lower latency. Instacart told shareholders in February that it plans to test store-shelf scanning from the carts in the "future."
Last year, Instacart added gamified quests, location-based coupons and aisle-aware advertising formats to the smart carts.
Instacart continues to grow the roster of retailers using Caper Carts, with recent sign-ons including Heritage Grocers Group, Weis Markets, Geisslers, Kroger, Schnuck Markets and Wakefern Food.
Copyright 2025 Industry Dive. All rights reserved.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
San Francisco Chronicle
9 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘Crisis moment': Are the Bay Area's supermarkets turning into ‘ghost stores'?
Every Safeway shopper in El Cerrito has a pet conspiracy theory about why company brass rearranged the grocery aisles. Years ago, the aisles were separated into two rows, with a gap in between for shopping cart passage. That all changed with the pandemic, when store workers consolidated the shelves so they extended from the checkout stands to the pharmacy in back. The design, more redolent of a warehouse than a traditional supermarket, can feel disorienting. And Safeway's explanation — that front-to-back aisles help maximize space and 'improve product adjacencies'— only added to the mystery. Toni Favila, who was outside the store on a recent morning, said she suspects that the long, unbroken aisles provide better sight lines for store security. Others swore up and down that the layout traps customers so they buy more groceries. A few shoppers see a different rationale. Safeway and other marquee stores are evolving for an era of e-commerce, with a large share of their customer base now ordering through an app and getting groceries delivered at home. Big titans such as Safeway promote their own apps for online shopping and delivery, though third-party platforms are also exploding. Instacart, an app that helped steer shoppers online more than a decade ago, reported 83.2 million orders throughout North America in the first quarter of 2025 — up 14% from a year ago. As the technology becomes more pervasive, it's started to warp the look and general vibe of the big chain grocers where people traditionally did their weekly shopping trips. Some have transformed so dramatically, they've come to resemble distribution centers. While shoppers may complain that Safeway's super-stretched aisles are harder to navigate, the setup appears to make it easier for 'pickers' — employees who push carts down the aisles, grabbing items for customers who've ordered online. In another particularly telling sign of the trend, many big box stores now keep fewer cashier stands open, encouraging shoppers to either use self-checkout, or do their bulk shopping through an app. At the Safeway in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood, shoppers gingerly sidestep a wheeled service cart stacked with industrial-size baskets for pickers. 'Let us shop for you!' a sign on the side of the cart exclaims. Once considered an essential staple of any thriving neighborhood, the American big box grocery store may be crumbling, felled by the same forces that closed shopping malls and turned so many sit-down restaurants into takeout stands. The next phase for urban supermarkets, according to Stanford University economics professor Nicholas Bloom, is that they become 'ghost stores': vast storage facilities that exist only to support e-commerce. 'You end up with this spiral,' said Dave Rochlin, a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. 'People stop going into the store, because it's better not to. Then you're stuck with stores that have insufficient traffic. And it's a crisis moment.' Most people grasp the positive benefits of online ordering, which started out as a luxury and became ingrained during the pandemic. The rise of remote work led more people to want frictionless lifestyles and helped popularize the idea of an 'omnichannel' business. Target, which had enormous success with delivery and pickup during COVID, probably inspired competitors, including the private equity firm that owns Albertsons and Safeway, Rochlin said. A spokesperson for Safeway declined to share the company's online order data, saying it is considered proprietary. The pandemic had other side effects, Bloom noted. Workers moved out to the suburbs, draining foot traffic from supermarkets in cities and heightening demand for grocery home delivery. Members of this new telecommuting class tend to have more disposable income, so it makes sense for large chains to cater to them. Bloom and three fellow economists — Scott Baker, Stephanie Johnson and Jana Obradovic — describe these shifts in a new paper, in which the authors analyzed a massive database of Nielsen home and shopping surveys. They found that the sustained prevalence of work-from-home has led to a 10% increase in spending on 'food and general merchandise' since 2020. Moreover, remote work households paid higher markups and bought fewer goods on sale, the authors observed. But as grocery chains across the country pour their innovation, talent and investments 'into the online part of the business,' brick-and-mortar retail spaces start to deteriorate, said Santiago Gallino, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Stores that have already lost walk-in customers are more sensitive to theft and street chaos outside, Bloom said. Once these issues become too aggravating, companies may decide it's not worth it to stay open. This story has already played out in San Francisco, with the closure of the Mid-Market Whole Foods in 2023, and the Fillmore Safeway in January. To people who prefer the old ritual of driving, biking or walking to a store and loading groceries into a cart, evidence of the migration online is everywhere. Customers who order online and come to the store for pickup often get premier parking spaces reserved near the entrance. Inside the store, pickers or professional gig-work shoppers are ubiquitous; woe to the person who stands in line behind an online delivery app worker with three separate orders, requiring three separate transactions. On top of it all, managing inventory has grown increasingly difficult, Gallino said. Supermarkets are now dealing with two separate 'inflows' of demand — one online, the other from customers inside the store. 'Traditionally, inventory is very tightly planned,' Gallino said. 'Then suddenly you have this influx of online orders, and you have to coordinate online and offline demands. It's annoying for both (types of) customers. If you order online, maybe half the items are available and you have to go to the store anyway.' Already, some customers are revolting. 'I actively avoid (El Cerrito) Safeway,' said Ian Malec of Richmond Annex, who has adapted his shopping habits. He's embraced the European model, making multiple trips a week to neighborhood markets that are pricier than Safeway but have the scruffy charm of old corner stores. The shelves, which are smaller and discretely separated from the check stands, are geared toward idle browsing rather than picking items for online orders, Malec said. Neighbors who haven't abandoned the El Cerrito Safeway say they mostly go there for small trips — 'what we call a two-bagger,' said Richmond resident Mischka Schaeffer. For bulk purchases, Schaeffer typically shops at Costco, an originator of the warehouse retail concept. Another customer, Mialani Quitugua, said she tries to be 'very targeted' when visiting a grocery store in person. Otherwise, she shops online. One chain that disavows online orders is Trader Joe's, which emphasizes the brick-and-mortar store as part of its brand. 'We love being a real place,' Trader Joe's vice president of marketing, Matt Sloan, said on a company podcast. He and his interlocutor, fellow marketing executive Tara Miller, touted the virtues of a small store composition, where customers can show up, discover new products and get recommendations from the staff. 'That experience would not be the same if you were trying to order something from a website that just showed you the products you already know about,' Miller said. Other chains have leaned into shopping and delivery apps believing — sometimes prematurely — that their customers will also embrace the technology. David Burke, a public safety liaison in the Castro, remembers when the online craze took hold of his local Whole Foods. More than a decade ago the upscale chain partnered with the online delivery platform Instacart, offering customers the 'convenient option' to place orders through an app, and pick them up at a participating Whole Foods Store. At the time, it was forward-thinking. Yet shoppers like Burke, who prefer to browse shelves in-person and haul their own baskets through a store, quickly became annoyed. 'When you came in, you saw about 30% of the store was dedicated to Instacart,' Burke said, recalling the stacks of bagged Instacart orders near the front entrance, the two checkout lanes reserved for Instacart purchases and the swarm of 'professional shoppers' hastily grabbing produce or packaged items. Remarkably, Whole Foods reverted back to its old, fancy, non-processed boutique style after Amazon purchased the chain in 2017. Stopping by on a recent Wednesday morning, Burke watched as shoppers aimlessly perused the showcased fruits and vegetables, picking an avocado from a pyramid to check it for bruises. At the bulk bins, a man unhurriedly shoveled pinto beans into a bag. 'Now that,' Burke said, pointing at the bean shoveler, 'is not a professional shopper.' Across the street, the Castro Safeway still gets a lot of walk-up customers, though the store has struggled to retain them. For a while, thefts and street conditions deterred the paying clientele, until Safeway reduced the store's hours and added new security gates in 2021. Now, customers enter through a bullpen: displays of flowers and seasonal fruit form a canyon that funnels people through a one-way turnstile, similar to El Cerrito. Inside, the aisles run uninterrupted end to end, though a clerk said they have been that way for years. Because the store is smaller than its El Cerrito counterpart, it needs a more compact layout. On the aesthetic spectrum of grocery stores, the Castro Safeway is closer to a conventional supermarket than a warehouse. But online orders are clearly a big part of the business. At 11 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, a delivery app worker was making two separate purchases at one of the cashier stands — one order entirely of meat, the other entirely carbohydrates. 'I have noticed a bunch of personal shoppers,' said Brett Thomas, who took the bus to the Castro Safeway because his nearest store closed in the Fillmore. Thomas said he sees bagged orders stowed in Safeway coolers, and occasionally hears calls for pickup over the store's intercom. It all reminds him of the changing times. No one can quite predict the future of grocery shopping, though current models suggest it will be more atomized and depersonalized. More of us, potentially, will be pecking our shopping lists into our phones, and waiting for deliveries from the nearest ghost store. This arrangement will certainly appeal to people who prize convenience and like the idea of tech-based courier service. It could be highly profitable for companies to closely track their customers' purchases. Nonetheless, something will also be lost, Gallino warns. He has a different vision for the supermarkets that continue to thrive five or 10 years from now. A few will move all their infrastructure online. Others will ditch their apps and revive the traditional retail format, allowing people to wander product displays and jostle shopping carts down crowded aisles. The ideal store, as Gallino imagines it, would still be a hive of human activity — not a mothballed staging area.
Yahoo
19 hours ago
- Yahoo
Walmart Shifts Toward Super Agents In Play to Upgrade AI Strategy
In a bid to simplify its growing artificial intelligence ecosystem, one retail giant said Thursday it would embrace a core four structure for agentic experiences. Walmart announced that it plans to center four 'super agents' to continue making agentic AI accessible to those who can benefit from its capabilities, internally and externally. More from Sourcing Journal Shuffle Board: Selmer Stays Depop CEO, Walmart Taps Instacart Exec to Head AI Byte-Sized AI: Google's User Try-On Goes Live; Nike Beta Tests In-App Conversational AI This is What Trump's New AI Action Plan Says About American Jobs and Manufacturing Agentic AI is meant to handle tasks autonomously, or near autonomously, which simplifies routine or mundane duties, freeing humans up to take on other responsibilities. The promise of AI agents has been widely touted inside large companies and for consumer-facing applications, though the latter use case has yet to see widespread adoption. Suresh Kumar, Walmart's global chief technology officer and chief development officer, detailed the super agent strategy in a LinkedIn post, where he noted that the company has been rapidly building agents 'for every aspect of the business.' And while he asserted that the agents had seen successful adoption across functions inside the company, he explained that the company found that multiple competing systems can cause uncertainty about which tool is best to rely on for specific tasks. 'Once we saw how quickly teams were adopting these agents and how helpful they were, we realized agents weren't just useful, they were essential,' Kumar wrote. 'But we also recognized that multiple agents—even if each one is useful—can quickly become overwhelming and confusing.' With that in mind, the company is working to deploy four super agents—one that's geared toward customers, another that aids associates, a third that works alongside developers and a fourth that targets Walmart's partners. Sparky, which is Walmart's already existing customer support agent will, in the near future, 'power even more: reordering, seamless support and shopping that feels even more effortless,' Kumar said. Marty, which is Walmart's partner agent, can aid suppliers, third-party sellers and advertisers with orders and business operations. The developer agent will work to accelerate Walmart's time to market on emerging technologies, 'enabling innovation at scale across Walmart.' The associate agent will be equipped with the ability to analyze sales trends, schedule employees and more. The super agents will be underpinned by agents assigned to handle specific tasks; where, currently, the company might have one agent handling scheduling for in-store employees and another tracking insights on real-time store inventory. Under the super agent model, both of those agents would be housed under Walmart's associate agent, which would provide users a single interface to interact with the different systems underneath it. The hope, then, is that having a single starting point to interact with AI agents will make operations less convoluted than having to access each individual agent separately. Kumar did not immediately make clear how many agents the company has already built but indicated Walmart plans to build additional agents inside each of the four super agents, as part of its plan to use breakthrough technologies to aid the company's growth. 'Over the next year, the super agents will become a more visible part of the Walmart ecosystem, even as we continue building more specialized agents that live within them,' he wrote. That, he contends, will aid Walmart as it works to upgrade multiple parts of its technology strategy. 'We're not just adopting the tools of the future—we're shaping them, leading with them and putting them to work for our customers, our partners and one another,' Kumar wrote in the post. Walmart competitor Amazon has introduced a slew of similar AI tools, though it hasn't gone as far as to say it has introduced super agents. Like Walmart, it currently has a customer shopping assistant, which it calls Rufus, and uses AI for myriad internal functions with the goal of giving shoppers a stronger shopping experience. Reuters reported that Walmart officials declined to comment on whether the super agents would be a catalyst for job loss in the future. The publication further noted that, without adding further details, Dave Glick, senior vice president of enterprise business systems, said the creation of super agents would add more jobs. The retailer announced Wednesday it had brought on Daniel Danker, Instacart's chief product officer, as its head of global AI acceleration, product and design. Danker, who begins next month, will report directly to Walmart CEO Doug McMillon. Meanwhile, other industry executives, including Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, are projecting that autonomous AI technology could actually usher in a decline in jobs going forward. Sign in to access your portfolio
NBC News
a day ago
- NBC News
Rick Huether, CEO of the Independent Can Company. Eric Kayne for NBC News Checkbook Chronicles Kicking the can down the road on tariffs won't work for this Maryland manufacturer Independent Can Company has raised prices twice this year already after Trump imposed 25% duties on steel in March, and then doubled them in June.
July 26, 2025, 7:15 AM EDT By Emily Lorsch When Rick Huether strolls the floors of his four manufacturing plants — two in Maryland and two in Ohio — employees' typical greetings such as, 'Hey, how's the family?' have been increasingly replaced with, 'Hey Rick, should I be looking for a job somewhere else?' Huether, the CEO of Independent Can Company, has had to raise prices on customers twice this year and it's the third time since President Donald Trump's first term. 'It's frustrating,' Huether said of the Trump administration's ever-evolving tariff agenda, which now includes 50% import taxes on the foreign-made steel his company relies on. 'I can't run my business the way I want to run it.' Huether, a Republican, said he shares the administration's goal of reinvigorating American industry. 'We want to bring as much manufacturing back to this country as you can. And as a family, we made a strategic commitment to being the specialty can maker in America with American workers,' he said. 'We want to be here.' But according to Huether, Trump has made that harder to do. He said he has never voted for the president because he dislikes how he treats people and communicates, and his trade policies have caused headaches for his business operations. 'Chaos is our nemesis,' Huether said, echoing a concern many small business owners have voiced for months amid Trump's erratic tariff rollout: 'We can't plan when we don't have a vision of what's going on for the next two or three years.' Business highlights Independent Can Company's wares might already be in your cupboard. The Belcamp, Maryland-based family business, in operation since 1929, makes the packaging for everything from Wegmans' brand of Virginia peanuts to the Santa Claus tins filled with chocolates or popcorn that hit grocery shelves around the holidays. The company manufactures cans and other containers for popular consumer brands including Swiss Miss, Zippo and Titleist. One of its newest customers is the lip balm maker Burt's Bees. Independent Can Company — whose annual sales have averaged $130 million in recent years — used to have more than 30 domestic competitors in specialty can making, Huether estimated, many of which were family-owned businesses. Today there are just a couple left, he said. The company employs about 400 people across its four plants. A fifth, in Iowa, closed in 2024 due to what Huether described as a combination of clients' shifting packaging needs and Trump's first-term steel tariffs. He secured some exemptions from those levies at the time but still had to raise prices in 2018 by anywhere from 8-16%, depending on the product. Independent Can Company's manufacturing process relies on a highly specialized material called tinplate, a very thin-gauge, flat-rolled steel with an electro-coated surface of tin. Developed as a corrosion-resistant material safe for food packaging, tinplate supplies are limited — the product makes up only about 2% of global steel production, Huether estimated, and it's only roughly 1% of the steel produced in the U.S. Up until about 2007, Independent Can Company bought most of its tinplate domestically but now sources most of it overseas — the majority from Germany, along with Taiwan and South Korea — due to foreign suppliers' quality, service and price. The business adopted more efficient production systems starting in the 1990s, which included a new printing line in 2000 that uses a larger sheet size, boosting efficiency. The issue: steel coils large enough for that system aren't available domestically right now, partly because American steel companies haven't kept up with manufacturers' needs, Huether said. In addition, the materials Independent Can Company uses are about twice as expensive in the U.S. than in Asia and about 20% more expensive than in Europe, Huether estimated. Tariff impacts The cost squeeze is weighing on Independent Can Company as it struggles to rebound from a rough two years, amid pandemic-related supply-chain issues and cost swings. Those challenges left the company with a lot of expensive steel that it had to sell at a loss. But after tens of millions in capital investments, including in automation, Independent Can Company is finally settling into a new normal that Huether expects to put the company back on surer footing this year, tariffs notwithstanding. Still, access to affordable tinplate is non-negotiable and remains a wild card. That material alone represents 50-75% of its products' prices, Huether estimated. With tariff exemptions removed in March, Independent Can Company began paying Trump's 25% levies on all its imported tinplate, a steep new expense that Huether said forced the business to hike prices on some products by 8-16%. After the duties were raised to 50% in June, the company imposed another round of 8-16% increases. 'This adjustment is necessary to ensure that we can continue to provide you with the high-quality products and service you have come to expect,' Huether informed clients in a statement on the company's website earlier this year. 'We've really absorbed the amount of the tariffs that we can absorb,' he told NBC News. 'It's going to be passed through.' Bringing the shine back to 'Made in America' Huether is relieved that Independent Can Company hasn't lost business yet since the price hikes, but that worry is ever-present. There's a risk that some companies will switch to cheaper packaging, he said, including options that may not be as safe or recyclable. But it's hard to know how things will shake out… 'You instantly go to: Well, is this going to happen, or is it a tactic to get somebody to do something else? Is it real or not?' he said. In the meantime, Huether doubts whether rewriting U.S. trade policy can bring back American manufacturing overnight, or even in a few years. Huether believes in expanding vocational training in schools and eliminating the stigma often associated with certain career paths. 'We do not have the skills in this country to manage it,' he said, nodding to a reality that companies and analysts across a range of industrial sectors have underscored since the trade war began. 'It takes one to five years to get a full manufacturing plant up and running,' Huether said. 'We need time to do this.' What's more, 'We need predictability and consistency,' he added. 'We need to understand what the rules are. If the rules are constantly changing, we don't know how to play the game.' Emily Lorsch Emily Lorsch is a producer at NBC News covering business and the economy.
