Where Shoppers Are Right Now
The store is back at the centre of the discovery conversation. After several years in which online convenience looked like the only growth vector worth funding, the data coming through in 2026 points in a different direction. Shoppers are returning to physical retail not just to fill a basket but to find something new, to touch and taste, and to make decisions they do not feel ready to make on a small phone screen.
That last point matters more than it sounds. The confidence gap, the distance between a shopper noticing a product and actually putting it in the basket, is where most in-store marketing investment either earns its money or disappears. Discovery zones and sampling close that gap by letting the product do the persuading. Digital shelf features like QR codes, verified ratings, and on-pack claims close it by giving the shopper the information they need to say yes without anxiety.
The P2PI "Experience Is Essential" angle is not a soft positioning statement. It is a commercial argument: when the in-store experience is well-designed, conversion rates go up and basket size follows. The "Digital Features Enhance Shopper Confidence" finding sits alongside it. Neither is about theatre for its own sake. Both are about removing the reasons a shopper hesitates.
What Is Changing Right Now: Named Retailer and Brand Moves
The clearest signal of where physical retail is heading comes from Whole Foods. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told investors that Whole Foods plans to add 100 new locations, part of an aggressive grocery growth push underpinned by more than $150 billion in gross grocery sales in 2025. That is a significant physical footprint commitment from a retailer that already has the digital shelf tools to support a full discovery-to-purchase journey inside the store. Whole Foods also launched Daily Shop urban markets, a smaller format aimed at high-frequency urban shoppers who want the full brand experience in a tighter space.
On the brand side, PepsiCo's Tostitos is doing something genuinely new: entering the refrigerated aisle for the first time with a fresh guacamole dip. The move targets an aisle where trial is critical and packaging claims do most of the selling work. Tostitos cited that 64 percent of consumers eat guacamole with tortilla chips, a demand signal strong enough to justify the cold-chain complexity. That kind of brand extension, crossing from ambient to chilled, lives or dies on planogramming and proximity. If the guac is not adjacent to the chip display, the cross-sell logic breaks. Sampling would do the rest.
Sprouts Farmers Market is working a different in-store problem. After comparable-store sales fell 1.7 percent in Q1 2026 and net sales reached $2.3 billion, driven mainly by new store openings rather than existing-store performance, the grocer is rebuilding shopper confidence on value through selective price cuts on visible essentials like coffee. The chainwide loyalty programme, launched in October, is the personalisation engine that sits beneath that. But the in-store perception problem is real: shoppers who feel a store is not affordable stop exploring it. Price signals on shelf, whether through promotional tags, shelf-edge labels, or loyalty pricing made visible at the fixture, are part of the experience toolkit, not just the pricing toolkit.
Challengers are using in-store discovery as a growth mechanism too. Ferrero North America is launching Nutella Peanut, its first new Nutella flavour in six decades, after years of consumer demand for the variant. That kind of long-awaited launch needs sampling and a dedicated fixture moment to convert curiosity into a first purchase. So does Seven Sundays' PB Puffs, which carries 10 grams of upcycled oat protein per serving, a claim that works well on a QR-linked digital shelf panel but that most shoppers will not absorb from a pack back alone.
The small-format closure wave is also a useful signal for experience design. Schnucks closed its Fresh store in Jasper, Indiana after insufficient customer traffic since opening in summer 2021. Publix, Kroger, Stop and Shop, and Whole Foods have all closed similar formats. The pattern suggests that smaller footprints only work when the experience density is high enough to justify the trip. A small store that feels like a smaller version of a big store fails. A small store designed around discovery, sampling, and digital shelf confidence tools is a different proposition entirely.
What This Means for Commercial Leaders on Monday
Your planogramming, sampling budget, and digital shelf investment are almost certainly managed by different people with different objectives. That is the structural problem. A discovery zone without sampling is a display. Sampling without a digital confidence layer, ratings, QR, on-pack claims that answer the questions a shopper actually has, is a one-time taste event with no purchase conversion tail. Digital shelf features without a physical arrangement that surfaces them to the right shopper at the right moment are features no one clicks.
The Tostitos refrigerated launch is a useful test case to think through. The brand has the recognition, the demand signal (64 percent of guacamole eaters pair it with tortilla chips), and the product quality. The question is whether the retailer planogram puts the guac within arm's reach of the chips, whether there is a sampling moment at launch, and whether the chilled fixture carries enough digital information to close the confidence gap for a first-time buyer. If one of those three is missing, conversion suffers.
For brands launching into new aisles or new formats, the same logic applies. Map the confidence gap first. Ask what a shopper would need to see, taste, or read to move from noticing your product to picking it up. Then build the in-store execution backward from that question rather than forward from your production calendar.
Retailers facing a traffic or comparable-sales problem, as Sprouts is now, should look hard at whether the discovery experience in-store is genuinely differentiated or whether it has drifted toward a standard planogram with a loyalty app bolted on. The stores that will grow existing-customer spend in 2026 are the ones where the experience itself gives shoppers a reason to linger and explore, not just to restock.