McKinsey estimates that retailers with autonomous AI systems are growing 50 per cent faster than competitors. Cognizant projects $4.4 trillion in additional spending over the next five years from customers embracing AI. Agents are not an investment in the future of retail, they are already the present, and those who delay to act today risk having to make up for a hard-to-fill disadvantage tomorrow
“49% of young people now consult ChatGpt for eCommerce and soon this trend will also reach Europe. Walmart has made a deal with OpenAi because they want to control the flow of information: lists, prices and more’. The future of eCommerce has arrived
And as we write, 98% of 88VIP customers in China are already deciding where to spend their next money. WeChat knows where and when. Alipay knows the optimal pricing. The advertising system knows which message is most effective for that person, at that time, on that category. Europe is still debating whether GDPR allows data sharing.
Today, eCommerce food & grocery, although still representing a limited share of the overall turnover of food distribution, has in several cases reached economically sustainable models. This topic was discussed at the eCommerce Food Conference during a round table discussion between Giuseppe Caprotti and Mario Gasbarrino, two historical protagonists of Italian large-scale retail, moderated by Cristina Lazzati, director of Mark Up and Gdoweek
A planetary trade war, eminently political, in which the Chinese and Americans are the ‘masters’ and Europe, apart from a few rare exceptions – such as Lidl – has stood by and watched
We often imagine the Made in Italy agri-food industry as a self-sufficient system, capable of producing all the raw materials it uses in-house. The reality is quite different
Mercosur: it is obvious that the ‘invasion’ risk of uncontrolled products, without the safeguard clauses, is likely to exacerbate the risks to our health. But the real problem is that in the European Union there are ‘derogation’ authorisations that allow prohibited substances to be used by member countries to compete unfairly with their neighbours. So before lashing out at Mercosur, perhaps we need to put things in order in Europe
Walmart, the 12th largest company in the world in terms of capitalisation, has a chance to face eternal rival Amazon on an equal footing
The PepsiCo case confirms what was already known: many major brands have inflated their prices and margins in recent years. Not least because a 15 per cent drop suggests they had plenty of ‘room for manoeuvre’. PepsiCo was the world’s second-largest food producer in 2023, behind Nestlé and ahead of the Brazilian meat producer JBS.
Technology platforms are like transnational states: they may perhaps pay fines in the billions, but they will almost certainly never pay taxes equivalent to those paid by their competitors. And they will therefore continue to operate by competing unfairly with them
‘It is necessary to avoid using both imported hazelnuts and Piedmontese hazelnuts in the same product’. Ferrero could follow Barilla’s example – which sells pasta made from 100 per cent Italian wheat – and perhaps introduce a distinction between Italian and non-Italian products
In the face of continuous scandals, the consortia, instead of trying to get the ham out of an image impasse and think about relaunching consumption of Parma ham, making it ‘cool’, as the Iberian jamon has done, prefer to celebrate themselves by doubling the museum (with 600,000 euro from the Pnrr)
