Do You Trust Your Grocery Store?

K Group is one of the biggest grocery retailers in Finland. But like so many companies, they have also struggled to successfully communicate their sustainability initiatives to consumers.

Marketing sustainability initiatives is tough for any company. On one hand, you want to let consumers know the good work you are doing and how they can get involved. On the other hand, it’s easy to step into the territory of green washing if you can’t back up those commitments. This brings us into the murky waters of marketing, sustainability, trust, data, and brand loyalty. All juicy topics that I explore today with Heidi Jungar, K Group’s Customer Insight Director.

K Group is one of the biggest grocery retailers in the Finnish market. Like so many Nordic supermarkets on this show, they have also struggled to successfully communicate their sustainability initiatives to consumers. Enter Heidi. Her job is to analyze the data and see how she can improve that relationship.

My biggest takeaway from this interview was the notion of trust in how and from where we buy our food. It is not lost on me how much grocery stores depend on consumers’ trust, and how much we depend on them. We trust them to provide us with safe food that won’t make us sick. We trust them to procure good foods that support people and the planet. We trust them to be fully stocked so that we don’t face food scarcity. I think trust is the make or break it factor. What do you think? Do you trust your supermarket?

I was surprised at the digital transformation K Group is going through. When I think of my supermarket, I certainly don’t think of a tech-forward company, but K Group is thinking next-gen. They are actually giving data back to their consumers to make the experience more personal and building services on top of that data. I especially loved the conversation around the supermarket of the future, people’s tendency to grocery shop on autopilot, and the ‘Thank The Producer’ program, which gives back to Finnish farmers.

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