Latest Blogs

Every grocery store is a carefully engineered decision-making environment. The width of an aisle, the height of a shelf, the product sitting at eye level as a shopper rounds a corner—none of it happens by accident. Product placement in stores is one of the most powerful and most underleveraged levers available to grocery store owners […]

Key Takeaways Point-of-sale materials (POSM) drive an estimated 60% of purchase decisions in store, and brands invest 12–20% of total revenue in them. Yet most have no scalable way to confirm they have ever reached the shelf. POSM Compliance AI, a new capability in GoSpotCheck by FORM, automatically detects and reports on point-of-sale materials the […]

It’s 6:45 a.m., and a route driver is already on their third stop of the day. They’ve got a full truck, a tight schedule, and a paper checklist that’s already smudged from the morning rain. At the last store, the endcap display never got built because there wasn’t time, and the cooler is two facings […]

Getting beer, wine, and spirits products into retail locations is a significant operational achievement. But for Bev-Alc suppliers and distributors, it’s only half the job. What happens after delivery is where sales are won or lost, and this means knowing whether products are placed correctly, promotions are activated, and merchandising standards are upheld. Retail execution […]

Key Takeaways Gen Z accounts for over 40% of U.S. consumers and possesses hundreds of millions in disposable income, making their long-term loyalty critical to a retailer’s bottom line. Traditional marketing fails with this demographic; instead, they rely on social media influencers, celebrities, and peer recommendations to discover and purchase products. Gen Z expects brand […]

Walk into any well-run grocery or liquor store, and you’ll notice something: the beer section looks deliberate. Products are faced forward, coolers are stocked, endcaps are branded, and seasonal promotions are exactly where they should be. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because a beer merchandiser showed up and did their job. But what […]

Non-alcoholic beverages are getting more attention than ever with better-for-you drinks, functional waters, low-sugar prebiotic sodas, and flavor-forward zero-proof options. The beverage industry is experiencing a category shift as the non-alcoholic beverage industry is currently valued at $760 billion dollars, driven by consumer behaviors around health, flavor, occasions, and in-store visibility. For beverage brands, this […]

A retail planogram doesn’t fail in the boardroom. It fails in aisle seven, when a field rep skips a facing because the audit form doesn’t flag it, or when a misplaced product sits on the physical shelf undetected for two weeks before anyone notices the sales dip. Most retail planogram strategies aren’t broken at the […]

Headquarters spends months (and often millions) engineering the perfect shelf strategy. Planograms get built. Trade agreements get signed. Promotions get funded. Then those plans hit the physical store, and execution fractures. Products land on the wrong shelf, displays go up late or not at all, or maybe, a rep marks the audit complete because they […]

Merchandising has always been about influence. Where a product sits, how it’s displayed, and whether it’s available when a shopper reaches for it—these decisions have shaped retail outcomes for as long as stores have existed. But the tools you use to make and execute those decisions have changed almost beyond recognition. What started as intuition-driven […]

Seasonal execution is one of the highest-stakes responsibilities in the grocery industry. Displays need to turn, planograms need to hold, and shelves need to stay full—all while the next reset is already on the horizon. This checklist is built to help grocery merchandisers get it right, every season. What Is a Grocery Merchandiser? A grocery […]

A decade-long look at U.S. average retail prices for 10 common supermarket items reveals exactly where your grocery budget is going today. Most of us run through the grocery store on autopilot. You grab the same brand of coffee, the same loaf of bread, and the same cut of meat week after week. But if […]