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A Practical Omnichannel Maturity Guide for Regional Grocers
Matt Van Glider
Matt Van Glider
Matt Van Glider
Most regional grocers aren’t falling behind because they lack ambition or technology. They’re struggling because their omnichannel operating model was never rebuilt to support the growth they layered on over time.
A Practical Omnichannel Maturity Guide for Regional Grocers reframes omnichannel challenges as a leadership and sequencing problem, not a digital one, and introduces a clear, executive-level framework to diagnose where cracks are forming before they become costly failures. Through the Omnichannel Maturity Grid, the guide helps leaders see whether their business is fragmented, overextended, or truly positioned to scale, and, more importantly, what to fix first.
If your teams feel stretched, initiatives stall, or AI and retail media aren’t delivering on their promise, this guide offers clarity, prioritization, and a path forward grounded in real-world grocery operations.
Rebuilding Clarity
Most regional grocers are not immature. They are misaligned.
You did not get here by accident. You added channels because customers demanded them. You partnered with marketplaces because reach mattered. You launched retail media because margins were under pressure. Each decision made sense at the time.
But no one rebuilt the operating model underneath. Now you are running four distinct businesses inside one business. They were never designed to work together. This is not a technology problem. It is an operating model problem.
The Omnichannel Maturity Grid helps you see where you stand across two dimensions: Unified Commerce (how well your internal operations work together) and Connected Commerce (how strategically you engage external ecosystems).
The grid is not a scorecard. It is a prioritization tool. It shows you what to fix first and what to delay until the foundation holds.
The Operating Model Problem
Walk into any regional grocery operation and you will find four businesses running in parallel:
The store: The foundation of the business. Where customers form impressions, where service and fresh matter most, and where culture and labor live. The store anchors the P&L and the brand experience. If the store does not work, nothing else does.
Owned ecommerce: The digital extension of the store, operating on a different cadence. Pickup and delivery introduce new expectations around timing, accuracy, substitutions, and communication. What appears simple requires coordination the traditional store was never designed to support.
Partnerships: Marketplaces like Instacart and DoorDash, and savings platforms like Fetch and Ibotta, expanded reach and volume as digital commerce grew. They help you serve customers you may not reach on your own. But they also sit between you and your customer, and between you and your suppliers, taking margin, data, and control.
Suppliers & retail media: The B2B side of the business. Traditional supplier relationships now coexist with retail media, which is built around audiences, content, and performance. Retail media brings real revenue potential, but it requires new skills and a proposition that can stand alongside national players.
Each evolved for good reasons. Each was stacked on top of what came before. No one asked whether the foundation could hold the weight. The result is what one industry analyst called a “giant hairball” of point-to-point integrations between siloed systems.
That is the problem. Not a lack of capability. Not a shortage of investment. A loss of clarity about what business you are actually running. This is not a digital problem. It is an operating model decision that belongs at the executive table.
Most omnichannel commerce efforts stall not because teams fail but because ownership is fragmented across digital, IT, merchandising, and operations with no single executive accountable for the operating model as a whole.
The stakes are real.
According to FMI and NielsenIQ, more than 90% of grocery consumers now shop both in store and online. This is no longer an edge case. It is the norm. FMI and NielsenIQ project U.S. online grocery sales will grow from $276 billion in 2024 to $388 billion by 2027.
Grocery Doppio research shows omnichannel shoppers spend 1.5x more than single channel shoppers and are nearly three times more loyal. They are your growth engine.
If your operating model is fragmented, you are leaking value from the customers who matter most.
Every initiative grocers care about now assumes a unified foundation. Retail media. AI. Automation. Margin recovery. All of it puts weight on a foundation that may already be cracking.
eMarketer reports Walmart controls 31.6% of the U.S. digital grocery market. Amazon controls 22.6%. Together they own more than half the digital grocery spend.
Regional grocers are not competing against each other anymore. They are competing against operators who solved the foundation problem years ago.
When You Hit the Wall
Every regional grocer eventually hits the same wall.
Online and in-store experiences diverge.
Not by design, but because systems do not connect.
AI pilots stall because the data is fractured. Retail media underperforms. Store teams push back on digital initiatives because nobody prepared them.
Leadership asks the question: Why is this not working?
The answer is almost always the same. You built growth on top of a cracked foundation and expected technology to fix it.
This is not a future risk. This is happening now, in boardrooms across the industry. Delay is not neutral. Every quarter you wait, the foundation takes more weight.
That is what the Omnichannel Maturity Grid provides.
Not another checklist.
A way to finally see clearly.
The Omnichannel Maturity Grid
Omnichannel commerce maturity is not about channel count. It comes down to two things:
Unified Commerce: How well your internal operations work together (store, ecommerce, pricing, inventory, loyalty). Brick Meets Click data shows more than 70% of digital grocery sales still happen on owned channels. This is why Unified Commerce anchors the vertical axis.
Connected Commerce: How strategically you engage external ecosystems (marketplaces, delivery partners, savings platforms, retail media). Are you building on a connected foundation, or piling complexity on top of it?