Quick Take — Ferrero acquires Purely Elisabeth

Purely Elisabeth’s product range includes traditional granola, oatmeal (oat-based meals), breakfast cereals and, above all, protein granola (gluten-free, vegan and GMO-free).

It appears that the company was acquired for a sum equivalent to three times its turnover (approximately $600 million).

The granola market is worth $1.3 billion and Purely Elisabeth is the market leader.

The products are stocked by major retailers: Target, Kroger, Sprouts, Whole Foods (Amazon) and Costco.

The brand will most likely be managed by Lapo Civiletti.

Quick Take — Amazon on Whole Foods

“Over the past two years, we have cut prices and doubled the number of promotions to deliver greater value to our customers,” wrote Buechel. “Since 2017, savings like these have added up to hundreds of millions of dollars for customers. We’re arguing that you don’t have to choose between quality and value, and we’re offering industry-leading prices on high-quality food. …

“We were the first retailer to launch our certified organic regenerative products, and we are proud that, in 2025 alone, more than 61% of all fresh produce sold in our stores was organic, compared to an industry average of 16%”

Quick Take — Whole Foods Market to open six new Daily Shop shops in the UK in the coming months

The point-of-sale assortment will include :

A range of certified organic and conventional products.

Prepared food options, including lunchtime salads, sandwiches and seasonal favourites.

An assortment of meat and seafood with a variety of convenient grab-and-go offerings. All meat items are certified for animal welfare and include organic options and all seafood offerings are sustainably caught in the wild or responsibly farmed.

A bakery department offers fresh bread daily and everyday favourites such as Whole Foods’ Viennoiserie and brown butter biscuits. The department also provides a wide variety of special diet items, including gluten- and dairy-free brownies, doughnuts and biscuits.

A Wellness & Beauty department with a wide assortment of supplements, skin care, hair care and more.

A speciality department highlighting artisan cheeses and producers, as well as local and premium beers, wines and spirits.

The first Daily Shop experiment was made in 2024 in the United States.

The pdv area will range from 300 to a maximum of 1,000 square metres.

Quick Take — Instacart (US e-commerce) democratises ‘consumer intelligence’ with an AI-powered portal

Customer intelligence, often referred to as customer intelligence CI, is the collection, analysis and use of data to understand your customers’ behaviour, preferences and needs.

The Instacart Consumer Insights Portal (CIP) is a software platform that gives brands direct access to purchasing behaviour across the Instacart marketplace. Based on daily activity from nearly 100,000 locations, CIP offers marketing, sales, revenue growth management and insights to self-service teams access to SKU-level performance, search behaviour, substitution patterns and promotion impact, all based on actual transactions, not modelled data or survey panels.

Instacart is a service that does ‘last mile’ e-commerce for many US retailers. Instacart works with more than 1,400 different brands (national, regional and local), covering more than 80,000 shops across North America. Walmart is among its partners:although the Bentonville, Arkansas-based giant has its own strong delivery infrastructure, it works with Instacart in selected markets to expand its coverage. Below: the Instacart service at Whole Foods in 2016.