You’ve made the big tech investment; the vendor made a persuasive case and had the evidence to back it up. Your team has worked closely with the vendor to roll it out – at a small scale first, but then the entire chain. It’s live now.
Early numbers seem encouraging, but the question still nags in the back of your mind… “Are my customers really using this thing?”
The answer is likely: “Yes… but selectively.”
Grocery shoppers are using digital tools where the value is obvious and easy to access: saving money, checking specials, building lists, ordering pickup or delivery, comparing prices and researching products.
What they are not doing, at least not uniformly, is adopting every feature retailers have layered into apps, websites, and in-store technology platforms.
FMI’s January 2026 Grocery Shopper Snapshot found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, 98% of grocery shoppers have a smartphone with them in the aisle. The most common uses are practical: finding digital coupons, checking weekly specials and comparing prices across stores. Shoppers also use phones for recipes, product reviews, item location, QR-code scans and nutrition information.
You Can’t Overstate the Importance of Smartphones
Largely as a consequence of ubiquitous portable computing, online grocery is also no longer a side channel. Brick Meets Click reported that U.S. “e-grocery” sales reached a record $12.7 billion in December 2025, up 32% from a year earlier. Monthly active users placed an average of 2.9 orders during the month; more than half of users placed three or more orders. As of December 2025, online shopping accounted for fully 19% of the weekly grocery spend. That’s the highest level since the depths of the pandemic in May 2020.
The longer-term forecast points in the same direction.
Brick Meets Click projects online grocery will grow at an impressive 8.9% compound annual rate from 2025 through 2029 – more than five times the expected 1.7% growth rate for in-store sales. Online sales are forecast to account for 17% of total U.S. grocery spending by the end of 2029.
This is all undeniably bullish; it reflects a nice return on the big investment grocery operators have made in technology going back three, five, even 10 years.
There’s a catch: customer usage of this technology is uneven.
Customers Are a Long Way from Purely Digital
FMI and NIQ say in-store still accounts for about 80% of grocery sales, even as e-commerce is expected to drive most future growth.Their 2026 digital engagement report projects U.S. online grocery sales will reach $452 billion, or 25.5% of grocery-related sales, by 2028.
That gap – between 25.5% and 100% – “suggests” the shopper is not becoming purely digital! Rather, they’re hybridizing. Grocery Dive, citing FMI and NIQ, reported that more than 90% of shoppers now buy groceries both in-store and online.
For retailers, the lesson is clear: digital adoption is strongest when the tool solves an immediate shopper problem.
Digital coupons work because they save money. Pickup works because it saves time. Delivery works when convenience outweighs fees. Price comparison works because inflation has “trained” shoppers to check.
More speculative tools face a higher bar. AI shopping assistants, smart carts, scan-and-go and social commerce clearly hold a lot of promise, but they are not yet as embedded as the smartphone, the loyalty app or the online basket. FMI found that 68% of shoppers have used AI-enabled tools and 53% have used them for at least one food-related need, including recipes, meal planning, price comparisons and nutrition questions. Still, only 26% are regular AI users.
It would be wrong to conclude grocery technology is overbuilt somehow, or overreaching. I think the right conclusion is that shoppers are disciplined, perhaps more than we might think.
They use the features that reduce friction, cut cost, or improve confidence… and, for now, they ignore the rest.
For grocers, that should prompt a re-calibration of the requirements for new technologies, and ask which digital features are frequent enough, valuable enough and measurable enough to justify the cost.
