The Fresh Grocer goes live with new digital storefront

The Fresh Grocer has launched a new digital storefront powered by the ThryveAI online grocery platform, marking the fifth Wakefern Food Corp. supermarket banner to adopt the e-commerce solution.

Miami-based ThryveAI said Wednesday that The Fresh Grocer has gone live on Thryve Commerce at all of its 11 stores in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, including seven in the Philadelphia area. The platform brings enhanced search and product browsing, digital coupons and a more personalized online grocery shopping experience for customers.

As a multi-banner grocery retail cooperative, Wakefern faces the challenge of providing unique front-end experiences for its supermarket brands while maintaining administrative control at the enterprise level, ThryveAI noted. That led the co-op to seek a centralized, scalable solution with a flexible content management system that enables non-technical users to manage the look and feel of their digital storefronts.

To that end, the Thryve multi-site solution allows Wakefern to manage the online storefronts of grocery retail banners from one administration console, ThryveAI said. The technology also works with Wakefern’s enterprise e-commerce architecture and enables the company to manage unique shopping experiences at the banner and store levels.

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“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,” according to Elizabeth Goodbread, director of digital commerce at Wakefern. “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, a simplified checkout and time-slot reservation process, as well as enhanced product landing pages that help customers make informed purchasing decisions.”

The Fresh Grocer's new digital storefront brings enhanced search and product browsing, digital coupons and a more personalized online grocery shopping experience, according to ThryveAI.

A partnership between Wakefern and Mi9 Retail, ThryveAI’s parent company led to the launch of The Fresh Grocer’s new digital storefront, ThryveAI said. Last year, Wakefern’s Dearborn Market, Price Rite Marketplace, Gourmet Garage and Fairway Market store banners went live with new websites and mobile applications via the Thryve Commerce and Thryve Mobile platforms, which enabled the co-op to manage multiple e-commerce sites centrally.

“In a typical multi-tenant SaaS model, each grocery store location or banner has its own separate website, back-end administration dashboard and login. This is very cumbersome to manage, lacks consistency, stymies economy of scale, and makes it difficult to sync real-time data across digital storefronts,” explained Neil Moses, CEO of ThryveAI. “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.”

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Overall, Keasbey, N.J.-based Wakefern’s retail network includes 363 independently owned and operated 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.