Retail Strategies & Supplier Insights

If 2025 felt like retailers were measuring everything, 2026 is when they start enforcing it with fewer humans in the loop. The reason is simple: AI and automation spending is exploding. International Data Corporation (IDC) forecast that year-over-year spending on AI will grow 31.9% from 2025 to 2029, reaching $1.3 trillion by 2029, driven largely by agentic AI-enabled applications.

2026 looks like a year of modest top-line growth, more challenging profit math, and more “systems-driven” retail. Translation: retailers will still want growth, but they’ll increasingly demand it through automation, tighter compliance, and pay-to-play visibility.

If you’re a retail supplier, 2025 probably felt like you were fighting margin with both hands tied behind your back. Not because demand disappeared. Not because your product suddenly got worse.

Let’s talk about a problem that’s draining suppliers dry— retail deductions. You send a shipment, triple-check the paperwork, and think you’re in the clear. Then, weeks later, a chargeback pops up on your invoice. The retailer claims they were shorted, the labels were wrong, or there was some obscure compliance issue. At first, you shrug it off. Cost of doing business, right? But then it happens again. And again. Suddenly, thousands of dollars are disappearing from your botto

Here’s the curveball: post-audit deductions can arrive months—even two years—after the sale. If your documentation is messy, those “closed” periods reopen with painful surprises.

If Congress misses the October 1 funding deadline, parts of the U.S. government will shut down. Essential services will keep running, but...

You hire a food broker to open doors. Great. But the best brokers do something more valuable: they keep those doors from slamming shut because of compliance misses

Imagine this: you ship a $250,000 order of frozen entrees to a major retailer. A few weeks later, the payment arrives—short by $15,000. The code on the statement says “shortage,” but your warehouse confirms the pallets were shipped in full.

The ABCs of Walmart's OTIF Initiative Walmart's On-Time In-Full (OTIF) program is crucial to your supplier journey. It boils down to two...