How is AI changing grocery store pricing?

Grocery retailer Coborn’s is adopting an AI-driven pricing platform from Revionics to coordinate how it sets prices and promotions across its 80-store portfolio.

The move comes as the employee-owned grocer expands through new formats and banners and faces the operational burden of managing pricing across a more complex footprint. The company announced that the Revionics system will support both base prices and promotions, replacing manual processes with a centralized, data-driven model that adjusts to local market conditions.

Coborn’s operates stores across Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois under multiple banners. As the network has grown, the company said it needed “flexible and localized pricing” to manage differences across formats and competitive environments.

The decision to deploy Revionics shifts pricing from a distributed manual function to a consolidated analytical one, with the stated goal of improving alignment across brands and helping the company “price right on the items our guests care about most,” according to its senior director of pricing strategy.

U.S. Grocers Using AI to Overhaul Pricing

Several U.S. retailers have taken similar steps to modernize pricing operations, though with different tools and scopes. Vallarta Supermarkets, a regional chain with more than 60 stores in California, expanded its work with RELEX Solutions to include AI-powered pricing and promotion optimization. Vallarta executives described the expansion as part of an effort to upgrade planning accuracy and improve promotion performance across roughly 30,000 SKUs, building on earlier assortment and space-planning deployments.

Sedano’s, the largest Hispanic supermarket chain in the United States, selected RELEX to unify pricing and promotions across its approximately 32 stores in Florida. The company said the move would replace manual and spreadsheet-based workflows with analytics designed to improve price consistency and promotional targeting across its stores.

Large national chains have taken a different route, focusing on infrastructure to enable faster price changes at scale. Walmart began rolling out digital shelf labels to about 2,300 U.S. stores, stating the system would allow daily updates, reduce labor spent on manual tag changes, and improve accuracy for online order picking. Walmart said the technology would support efficiency while maintaining clear pricing for shoppers.

Kroger has also deployed digital shelf labels in select markets, a move that drew questions from lawmakers concerned that the technology could enable sudden or opaque pricing changes. The company did not describe the system as dynamic pricing but faced public scrutiny over whether automated label infrastructure could alter how and when prices shift on shelves.

These examples illustrate different approaches: regional grocers deploying specialized AI platforms for pricing and promotions, and national chains building the in-store infrastructure to support faster, centrally managed price changes. Coborn’s falls into the former category. Its adoption of Revionics places it alongside other mid-sized retailers using third-party AI systems to standardize pricing logic, introduce elasticity modeling, and coordinate promotions across multiple banners without investing in proprietary infrastructure.

Significance for Mid-Sized Grocers

Coborn’s shift to Revionics highlights how mid-sized, multi-banner retailers are approaching pricing modernization. The company said the platform brings “science, scale and precision” to decisions that previously depended on manual review. With stores operating in different competitive environments across six states, Coborn’s faces the same challenge reported by Vallarta and Sedano’s: the difficulty of maintaining consistency while adapting to local demand and category-specific price sensitivity.

Unlike Walmart or Kroger, Coborn’s is not deploying digital shelf labels or infrastructure-heavy systems. Its approach centers on software that can coordinate pricing centrally, model demand, and evaluate promotional outcomes across banners. That aligns more closely with the RELEX deployments at Vallarta and Sedano’s, where the objective is to replace fragmented decision-making with an integrated pricing and promotion framework.

Revionics positions its system as a tool for retailers seeking to manage complexity while maintaining local relevance. For Coborn’s, that means synchronizing prices across formats, improving promotional planning, and supporting growth into new markets. The company’s recent expansion created a larger network of stores with differing competitive pressures, making coordinated pricing more difficult without algorithmic support.

Coborn’s did not disclose expected financial impacts, but peer deployments suggest the potential gains come from improved promotional efficiency, margin protection, and reduced manual labor in pricing operations. Vallarta cited improvements in planning accuracy, and Walmart emphasized labor savings and pricing precision as benefits of its digital label rollout.

Coborn’s deployment will introduce similar operational dynamics: centralized oversight, automated modeling, and a reduced reliance on manual workflows. The company described the platform as a foundation for coordinating pricing across its banners as it continues to expand.