Supermarket Sweep: How APIs Are Shaking up Grocery Store Business Models

A few years ago, we posited the concept of a “smart store” on this blog. In that post on the changing face of retail, we described a few of the ways in which retailers might use APIs, AI, and automation to revolutionize the shopping experience.

We wrote primarily about how retail giants like Abercrombie & Fitch and Nike were using new technology to innovate in their physical stores. Since then, a very different breed of shops has been using APIs to shake up their offerings in all sorts of interesting ways: grocery stores.

People often say every company is now a tech company, and grocers are no exception. Below, we’ll cover a few ways supermarkets and grocery stores have innovated with APIs and gauge their successes. We’ll also consider what the future of grocery shopping could look like if their adoption is accelerated.

API Adoption Among Grocers Is Ramping Up

Many examples of APIs in retail deal primarily with e-commerce and online retail as opposed to big box stores. And there’s a good reason for that.

Historically, grocery stores have been reluctant to open up their data to third parties because of the risk that other retailers will use that data to price match or undercut their competition. But open data isn’t necessarily the silver bullet for price matching that stores might worry it is.

UK price comparison site Trolley highlights real-time deals from brands including Asda, Morrisons, Co-Op, Waitrose and others. Trolley did not respond for comment for this article, but we strongly suspect their service relies on web scraping rather than APIs.

These days, many retailers like Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Ocado use productDNA, a single catalog of independently verified data that can be accessed via APIs, to describe and share product information. Although brands may remain protective of their IP, it’s a clear acknowledgment of the power that collaborative data holds.

Grocery stores haven’t always made a ton of noise about how they’re using APIs, but we know for a fact that they’ve long been used behind the scenes. Way back in 2009, Tesco unveiled an API allowing access to its products database, while Waitrose’s Peter O’Shaughnessy recently wrote about the company’s shift from legacy APIs to GraphQL and microservices.

We’re also seeing more grocers in the US take the plunge and open up their data via APIs. Kroger, for example, has an extensive developer platform that boasts a range of partner, private, and public APIs, including tools that allow consumers to access profiles of authenticated Kroger customers, add items to their carts, and search the Kroger product catalog.

In recent years, Kroger has made a lot of noise (including at APIdays and Postman Galaxy) about their adoption of an API-first approach, and how the business has evolved as a result.

Brands like Mealime and Chicory are already using Kroger’s APIs to turn meal planning and recipe browsing into shoppable experiences, with options to build carts from ingredients and schedule pick-ups from local Kroger stores via their third-party apps. One Facebook user has even used Kroger’s API to track the historical price of eggs on their home assistant!

Meanwhile, we’re seeing interesting innovations like Walmart’s Immersive Commerce API, which enables developers of video games and VR experiences to integrate the purchase of physical goods from Walmart into their products. It may soon be more convenient to purchase an IRL bag of flour in a round of Fortnite than driving to the store…

From Behind the Scenes to Front of House

Beyond online shopping, APIs are being used in-store to better connect and empower staff members. Headset company VoCoVo, for example, uses APIs to connect smart fridges, checkouts, and shelving with headsets to notify workers when doors are left open, customers need assistance, or restocks are required.

Amazon’s Dash Cart, a smart shopping cart that links to online shopping lists and scans groceries prior to checkout, relies on APIs like the Company Ordering Connector API to pass data to third-party systems so they can calculate order totals, apply loyalty and discounts, and other actions.

Dash Carts also boast a “sales and deals” tab that changes based on where you are in the store, reflecting products from the aisle you’re standing in at that moment. If they take off (and that’s a big if), Amazon is hoping you’ll see them soon at a grocery store near you.

It’s worth noting that the adoption of innovations like those mentioned above has been slow. There are various reasons for that, but a big one is the high initial outlay required by retailers: Retail Technology Review estimates that Amazon’s Dash Carts cost between $5,000-10,000 each.

Another is tech fatigue from consumers — the general public is often skeptical, and sometimes downright scathing, about moves to transform the act of buying groceries in a physical store. (We bet it hasn’t been long since you heard someone complaining about self-checkouts).

Despite the potential smart tech and automation — so often reliant on APIs — have to change the shopping experience, retailers may face an uphill battle regarding their implementation.

Inventory Management and Ordering Systems

One of the benefits of opening up product catalogs via APIs is that it has cleared the way for a wave of food delivery platforms. Long plagued by the issue, it appears that the days of wildly unsuitable suggestions for alternative products could be numbered.

Most of us have heard of seriously unhinged product substitutions by the likes of Tesco and Waitrose in the UK, or DoorDash and Instacart in the US. (An attempt to swap out a bag of potatoes for a bottle of white wine remains a favorite of mine).

Instacart’s Connect API already has an API call in place to find replacement items from a selected store. At the time of writing, however, this can only be used to return replacement items that a customer has specified. With the right data, one could imagine this being extended to recommend in-stock items that have previously been approved X% of the time.

Sticking with Instacart, their IDP (Instacart Developer Platform) enables developers to build “rich end-to-end user journeys in meal planning, shoppable recipes, health, and more powered by Instacart’s marketplace and real world logistics.” Crucially, the IDP API “provides access to item availability and inventory data for products sold by retailers…across the country.”

The product debuted in early 2024, with launch partners including New York Times Cooking, Weight Watchers, and GE Appliances. Ordering groceries and ingredients directly from your touchscreen refrigerator or wall oven is no longer the exclusive domain of The Jetsons — it’s here.

Instacart says IDP enables third parties to “access a network of more than 85,000 available national, regional, and local retailers.” Although experimentation will have to wait for most of us — IDP is still advising us mere mortals to “Join Waitlist” — it feels like only a matter of time before partnerships with one or more market-leading grocers are announced.

Partnerships and Advertising Activities

Although its presence is much bigger on the West Coast of the US, Albertsons is a major player in the grocery space — second only to Kroger in North America — and has long been focused on forging partnerships with other leading companies to cement its position as a market leader.

In 2021, for example, Albertsons partnered with Google to create a “predictive grocery engine” using Google Pay (and APIs) for checking out, “AI-powered conversational commerce” and shoppable maps with hyperlocal features and recommendations.

It wouldn’t be the last time Albertsons sought to engage with partnerships using APIs. At the beginning of 2025, Albertsons Media Collective (the grocery chain’s advertising arm) launched an API that allows advertisers to pull campaign data directly into dashboards to track how advertisements and promotions are performing in close to real-time. It has also partnered with TransUnion, a credit reporting firm with a reputation for data and analytics.

The aim of this is to allow brands, armed with data from Albertsons and the power of TransUnion’s TruAudience marketing mix modeling solution, to bring the real-world impact of their advertising spend (on Albertsons’ website, app, and email blasts) into focus.

In that respect, Albertsons’ API fosters a data-driven approach to pricing strategies, product launches, and promotional campaigns that can be tweaked in close to real-time. Something that could help in-store displays, loyalty rewards, and so on feel more vibrant and alive.

The Grocery Store of the Future (May Not Exist)

The USDA reported that, as of 2022, almost 20% of Americans shop for groceries online at least once per month. FDA research suggests that number may be up to 55% compared to similar statistics from before the pandemic. It makes perfect sense that major retailers are competing to revolutionize online grocery shopping.

But what of the other 80% of shoppers who still buy their groceries offline? As we’ve seen above, attempts to modernize the act of in-store grocery shopping have been met with some resistance. Older generations, who are statistically more likely to do all of their grocery shopping in a brick-and-mortar environment, tend not to be as enthusiastic about changing their habits as younger crowds and worry more about automation taking people’s jobs.

While that might give the overall appearance that APIs don’t have a strong presence in this space, it’s clear from the above that many leading grocery chains understand that embracing APIs is a no-brainer when it comes to forging partnerships and creating additional revenue streams.

As important as they have been to modernization and scaling efforts in the grocery space, retailers still see the potential of APIs for both cutting costs and reacting to changing consumer (and advertiser) habits. At the very least, we expect to see other brands that haven’t already done so creating expansive developer portals like Kroger’s in the near future.

But, we should also expect to see more bold and brash consumer-facing experiments that openly rely on APIs. However they might turn out, we’re excited to see what that looks like.