Samsung recently announced that consumers will be able to order groceries directly from their new Family Hub fridge. MasterCard is launching the service in the tri-state New York City market with grocery partners FreshDirect and ShopRite. The Samsung fridge has an embedded 21 ½ inch touchscreen that comes preloaded with the MasterCard grocery app.
The app is also integrated with MyWebGrocer, an e-commerce software provider to the grocery industry, enabling additional grocers to transact through the fridge.
For those of us who don’t necessarily enjoy food shopping, ordering groceries online is not only convenient but eliminates trips to physical stores enabling shoppers to obtain groceries quicker and especially for those needed fill-in trips when key staple items are running low.
In the past several years, online shopping has threatened traditional retailers in other sectors, but this has not been the case for supermarket retailers. Now this is changing especially with fast-growing services such as Amazon Fresh, Instacart and Fresh Direct.
According to Nielsen, “One-quarter of online respondents say they order grocery products online, and more than half (55%) are willing to do so in the future. The growth of online grocery shopping is driven in part by the maturation of the digital natives—Millennials and Generation Z.”
McKinsey notes in a recent article, “By 2030, we expect retailers will be able to create new retail ‘worlds’—virtual stores that use augmented reality to give customers the experience of walking down a store aisle, for instance, or personalization engines that link to real-time biometric data to recommend meals with optimal nutritional content.”
In the next few years, it will be interesting how disruptive online grocery ordering will be to traditional brick and mortar supermarket chains.
Written by Heidi McIntyre
Managing Partner
Heidi@FullTiltMarketing.net
