Digital Platforms For Retail: Grocery’s White Spaces

Digital Platforms For Retail is a series exploring how digital systems are reshaping physical retail environments. Each instalment looks at a different sector to understand where digital integration is advancing, where it's falling short, and what that means for operators, owners and the spaces they occupy. This edition focuses on grocery, a sector with high operational complexity, rising digital pressure and major implications for real estate.

Digital deep dive
Grocery stores are becoming one of the most complex test cases for retail’s digital transformation. High stock keeping unit (SKU) velocity, tight margins, temperature-sensitive inventory, and rising expectations for speed and flexibility are pushing grocery beyond point solutions toward platform-based systems that connect data, operations and spaces.

From a real estate perspective, grocery is undergoing spatial reprogramming. Traditional store layouts prioritized aisle density and checkout areas. Today, space must support overlapping functions: in-store shopping, online order collection, staging, delivery dispatch and, increasingly, automated solutions for the ‘last mile’—the final leg of delivery to customers’ homes. Operators such as Kroger, through its Ocado partnership, are co-locating AI-driven fulfilment centres with stores. Walmart is investing in micro-fulfilment nodes and in-store automation to reduce labour dependency and compress delivery time. These models shift the role of the store from static retail box to multi-purpose logistics hub.

The transition, however, is far from complete. While many grocers have adopted tools for inventory visibility, demand forecasting and fulfilment, integration between these functions remains limited. Most systems still operate in silos. Inventory data often lack shelf-life resolution, which forces grocers to oversize cold storage as a hedge against spoilage. Forecasting tools are rarely connected to robotic fulfilment systems in real time, leading to bottlenecks that require excess staging areas and buffer labour. These inefficiencies drive higher energy loads, increase operational cost per square foot and reduce usable selling space.

Platform maturity is inconsistent. Large chains are building custom integrations, but mid-market grocers are relying on a patchwork of vendor solutions. As a result, spatial planning decisions – store sizing, back-of-house configuration, mechanical electrical and plumbing system design – are often made without full visibility into what the operational model will require several years out. This limits retrofit potential and slows innovation.

Aside from platform adoption, three major grocery trends stand out. First, fulfilment is being embedded into the store footprint, not just attached to it. This has implications for loading zones, HVAC loads and circulation flows. Second, grocery stores are expanding cold chain infrastructure – yet many aren’t yielding more efficient operations due to a lack of perishability-specific data. Third, front-of-house space is under strain. As checkout volumes fluctuate and pickup grows, stores are forced to overbuild for peak usage rather than optimize for blended demand.

The white space is clear. There is no dominant platform that connects real-time inventory, shelf-life analytics, robotics, point-of-sale traffic, maintenance, facilities management and energy systems in a way that drives actionable spatial decisions. Without that, operators build redundancy into design, resulting in extra space, extra equipment and extra labour. That redundancy is expensive and inflexible.

Grocery stores traditionally compete on price, convenience and assortment. But as fulfilment speed and digital integration become competitive levers, the performance of the physical space itself is coming under pressure. Long-term value will depend less on foot traffic alone and more on whether the building can support complex, digitally-enabled grocery operations. Those designed or retrofitted for logistics, automation and data integration will outperform in a sector where buildings must now operate as both a storefront and a supply chain node.