Week 10 of Podcast Recommendations: Grocery and CPG

Here are 9 podcast recommendations about the grocery and CPG industries.?Several of these episodes are about the impact of AI on this retail sector.

I’m taking a break for a few weeks and will resume with the last 2 newsletters in mid-August.?I’m still thinking of future themes so share any ideas you may have. ??

“The state of grocery retail around the world.” McKinsey on Consumer & Retail.?Online grocery is still really hard, everywhere in the world. ??(25 minutes)

“The potential of consumer insights and AI in retail.” Refreshing Retail.?This podcast from Ahold Delhaize features the grocer's Europe CEO and an AI ethics professor.?(41 minutes)

“GPT-4 and Generative AI’s Impact on Brands.” The Digital Deep Dive with Aaron Conant.?Todd Hassenfelt of Colgate-Palmolive shares his perspective on potential use cases for gen AI in the CPG world. (45 minutes)

“What Artificial Intelligence Means for Retail—with Asha Sharma, Instacart COO.” AI in Business.?There are a number of podcasts by the Instacart team about AI.?This and the next one with the CEO are useful to understanding the opportunity in grocery, but also the reality that it’s more an accelerant than anything.?(26 minutes)

“What’s for Dinner? AI-Driven Commerce with Instacart CEO Fidji Simo.” No Priors. Fidji provides a run-down of most of the key AI initiatives of Instacart, many of which are related to recommendation engines, but some of which are about natural language processing to better understand grocery shopper intent. (40 minutes)

“Hamid Saify of Liquid Death on Disruptive Marketing Strategies and Building a Strong Brand Community.” Brave Commerce. Hosts Rachel Tipograph and Sarah Hofstetter always find interesting guests and get great anecdotes from them.?Liquid Death is one of the biggest CPG stories of the pandemic and it’s arc from DTC brand to stores everywhere is impressive. (21 minutes)

“The power of heritage brands.”?The Food Chain by BBC News.?It seems like every beloved packaged item is owned by a conglomerate.?But Tabasco sauce is not!?This episode provides a little taste of how that company has stayed independent amidst more competition than ever in its sector.?(27 minutes)

“Top 5 Food Industry Ransomware Attacks?+ The Dangers of Food Fraud.” Xtalks Food Industry Podcast.?This was a surprisingly interesting episode about a number of ransomware attacks that I didn’t know happened, as well as about the rampant issues of counterfeit and other nefarious challenges with consumer goods, which are exacerbated by unregulated online marketplaces and distracted in-house lawyers.?(39 minutes)

“The Plan to Make GoPuff Profitable by 2024.” 20VC with Harry Stebbings.?As quick commerce has all but collapsed and this episode was recorded in late 2022, I think this is a great tools for educating everyone on startup spin.?Hopefully, you’ll pattern match the language and enthusiasm of entrepreneurial hopes and dreams, as well as outright embellishments about businesses, and learn to exercise skepticism and scrutiny toward whatever are the hyped companies of the future.?(55 minutes)