Where Shoppers Are Now
Shoppers did not stop caring about price. They recalibrated what they are willing to pay and where, and that shift has made legacy loyalty mechanics far less effective than they used to be. Sonja Evans, vice president of business intelligence and strategy at marketing firm Blue Chip, put it plainly in a Grocery Dive report on AI and forecasting: consumers have "recalibrated what they're willing to pay and where," making traditional forecasting and promotional approaches less reliable.
That recalibration is the context inside which every loyalty programme operates right now. A shopper enrolled in Tesco Clubcard, Kroger Boost, or Albertsons for U is not a loyal shopper in the old sense. They are a price-aware, data-generating shopper who is willing to share behavioural signals in exchange for something they find genuinely useful. The programmes that deliver on that implicit contract are growing. The ones that treat loyalty as a coupon distribution system are watching engagement erode.
The P2PI framing captures this precisely. The next era of loyalty will not be bought; it will be earned. Buying loyalty means offering a deeper discount than your competitor. Earning it means using what you know about a shopper to make their life a little easier or their basket a little better, consistently, over time.
What Is Changing Right Now
The most important operational shift in loyalty right now is the move from category-level promotions to SKU-level personalisation, and AI is what makes that move possible at scale.
Per a Grocery Dive analysis of how CFOs are using AI, Sudip Mazumder, senior vice president and retail industry lead at Publicis Sapient, said AI is enabling companies to move beyond blanket discounting by aligning markdown decisions to the performance of individual stock keeping units. Apparel companies including H&M and Zara have begun applying this approach. The grocery and CPG world is following the same path, but through the loyalty data layer rather than through markdown alone.
Tesco Clubcard remains the most data-rich loyalty programme in UK grocery. Its value to Tesco is not the discount mechanic but the behavioural signal. Every scan tells Tesco which categories a household buys, at what frequency, and with what sensitivity to price change. That data powers targeted promotions and, increasingly, personalised health and wellness nudges as Tesco expands its partnership with the NHS and private health providers.
Kroger Boost, the paid-tier upgrade on Kroger's 84.51-powered programme, is a different model. Shoppers pay an annual fee for free delivery and fuel savings, and Kroger uses the self-selection signal of who pays to build a higher-value audience segment for its retail media network. The loyalty tier and the media product are inseparable. For CPG brands, being relevant inside Kroger Boost's targeting envelope is not a media decision. It is a commercial one.
Albertsons for U takes a third approach, leaning into AI-generated personalised deals that differ shopper by shopper at the same store. The programme surfaces different offers to different households based on purchase history, which means two shoppers in the same postcode see different prices on the same SKU. That mechanic rewards engagement and data sharing rather than simple enrolment.
Across all three, the direction is the same: use first-party data to make the offer more relevant, reduce the cost of promotions that go to shoppers who would have bought anyway, and build a feedback loop that improves with each transaction.
The AI Layer Is Now Upstream of the Loyalty Mechanic
One signal worth watching closely sits slightly outside grocery but points directly at where loyalty personalisation is heading. Big tech platforms including OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are building direct-to-consumer health AI tools that let users upload personal data and receive tailored guidance, per a News-Medical.net report on health AI assistants. Amazon's One Medical Health AI links AI triage directly to Amazon Pharmacy and over 200 physical One Medical clinics.
That matters for loyalty because Amazon is already the company behind one of the most sophisticated loyalty programmes in the world, and it is now building a health data layer on top of its commerce infrastructure. A shopper who shares health data with Amazon One Medical and buys groceries through Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh is generating a signal set that no traditional grocery loyalty programme can match. If Amazon connects those data streams, personalisation at the health and nutrition level becomes possible at a scale that Tesco, Kroger, and Albertsons will find very hard to replicate quickly.
Amazon's grocery business reported more than $150 billion in gross sales in 2025, and CEO Andy Jassy told investors the company now considers itself the second-largest U.S. grocer, per Grocery Dive's coverage of Amazon's earnings. Perishables sales have grown more than 40 times year-over-year. Shoppers buying same-day perishables build larger baskets. The loyalty and health data flywheel Amazon is assembling is not a future scenario. It is already in motion.
Implications
Three practical observations follow from the signals above.
First, your joint business plan with any major grocery retailer should now include a specific conversation about how your brand appears inside their personalisation engine, not just their promotional calendar. If you are not in the conversation about which shoppers see your SKU in a personalised offer, a competitor is.
Second, the AI tools that CFOs are deploying to align markdowns to individual SKU performance will eventually be used by retailers to decide which supplier promotions to surface to which shoppers. Brands that bring their own first-party data and consumer insight to that conversation will have more influence over the outcome than brands that simply fund a trade rate and wait.
Third, Amazon's move to connect health data to grocery purchasing is the clearest signal yet that loyalty in the next three years will be increasingly tied to health and wellness personalisation, not just price and convenience. Categories with a credible health story, protein, functional beverages, low-sugar formats, will have a structural advantage inside personalisation engines that are starting to incorporate health signals. Categories without that story will compete on price alone, and that is a race with no good finish line.
The P2PI framing is right. Loyalty that is bought is rented. Loyalty that is earned, through relevance, through trust, through a programme that makes a shopper's life measurably better, is the only kind worth building toward in 2026.