Wakefern’s The Fresh Grocer Goes With ThryveAI for Online Shopping

The Fresh Grocer has become the fifth banner of retail cooperative Wakefern Food Corp. to use grocery-first e-commerce platform ThryveAI to power its digital storefront to offer shoppers a seamless omnichannel shopping experience.

ThryveAI’s multi-site solution enables Wakefern to easily manage its portfolio of grocery store banners from a single administration console. The technology works with Wakefern’s enterprise e-commerce architecture and streamlines centralized management of various e-commerce banner websites while delivering unique shopping experiences at the brand and store level.

“Our ultimate goal is to create a simple, smooth and intuitive online shopping experience for our customers, and that’s what we achieved by using ThryveAI to power The Fresh Grocer’s digital storefront,” said Elizabeth Goodbread, Wakefern’s director of digital commerce. “The site is modern, easy to use and clean. We made many improvements to our customer experience, including enhanced search functionality, improved navigation features to make it easier to locate specific items, [and] a simplified checkout and time slot reservation process, as well as enhanced product landing pages that help customers make informed purchasing decisions.”

Last year, Wakefern banners Dearborn Market, Price Rite Marketplace, Gourmet Garage and Fairway Market went live with new websites and mobile applications using Thryve Commerce and Thryve Mobile. This enabled the banners to use such features as enhanced search, product browsing and digital coupons that make online grocery shopping easier, more convenient and more personalized for customers. Wakefern was seeking a centralized, scalable solution with a highly flexible content management system that would let nontechnical users easily and efficiently manage the look and feel of their digital storefronts from a single administration console.

“In a typical multi-tenant SaaS [software as a service] model, each grocery store location or banner has its own separate website, back-end administration dashboard and login,” noted Neil Moses, CEO of Miami-based ThryveAI. “This is very cumbersome to manage, lacks consistency, stymies economy of scale, and makes it difficult to sync real-time data across digital storefronts. By contrast, ThryveAI’s multi-site model enables Wakefern to develop, test and launch new business models quickly and easily, not only on The Fresh Grocer’s site, but across all of Wakefern’s banners. This will, in turn, increase customer loyalty and expand market share.”

The Fresh Grocer, founded in 1996 and now operating 11 stores in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, became the 50th member of Keasbey, N.J.-based Wakefern Food Corp. in 2013. The largest retailer-owned supermarket cooperative in the United States. Keasbey, N.J.-based Wakefern comprises nearly 50 members that independently own and operate 363 supermarkets under the ShopRite, Price Rite Marketplace, The Fresh Grocer, Dearborn Market, Gourmet Garage and Fairway Market banners in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. The company is No. 23 on The PG 100, Progressive Grocer’s 2021 listing of North America’s top retailers of food and consumables.