There is a lot going on in the grocery industry both positive and negative—from discussions on tariffs to soaring egg prices. However, grocery brands that have been keen on investing in the fast-growing retail media space may have one less thing to worry about.

Turns out Thrive Market isn’t burdening grocery sellers with yet another tech stack to plug into for advertising. When it comes to retail media, Thrive Market has done a couple of things differently than others. The online grocer chose to partner with Instacart instead of building its own retail media tech stack.

The rationale behind not building a standalone offering was to integrate with a provider like Instacart, where grocery brands were already spending their money, April Lane, chief merchandising officer of Thrive Market, told Retail Brew.

“There’s so many retail media networks out there, and frankly, for brands, it’s really hard to manage all of the different networks,” Lane said. “It was really table stakes for us that we’re not going to build something that’s completely standalone, where a brand needs to learn yet another system and optimize their ad dollars separately from other channels.”

Lane expects Thrive Market to double its month over month ad revenue, given that more than 25% of brands have already begun investing in the company’s ad business. Thrive Market sells close to 750 brands on-site and has more than 1.6 million paying members. Lane sat down with Retail Brew and talked us through Thrive’s retail media approach.

Keep reading here.—VC

Growing luxury returns are pushing more quality products into the off-price market, according to Shraysi Tandon, CEO of Kidsy, a retailer of gently used baby and kids products.

“What Kidsy is seeing is a very strong blend of extremely premium and luxury brands that are now hitting the market at affordable prices to customers because they’re coming through the returns channel,” Tandon told Retail Brew.

Previously, she explained, medium-priced goods dominated the off-price market. But as more premium brands have loosened their return policies to compete with the likes of Amazon, returns have become a bigger portion of the products flowing downstream to discounters.

There was also a lack of off-price channels for returns of baby and kids products in particular, she added, which is where Kidsy comes in. Products previously destined for the landfill are now funneling into Kidsy’s online shop, offering “a pathway for revenue recovery” for retailers that sell in the category.

Keep reading here.—AV

We know that the use of AI can be detrimental to the environment because it requires so much energy, but at the same time, many tech companies are using AI’s data-monitoring abilities to reduce their environmental footprint.

Recently, Amazon joined that group when it announced three AI tools—FlowMS, Base Building Advanced Monitoring (BBAM), and Advanced Refrigeration Monitoring (ARM)—that detect system irregularities that humans can’t to reduce energy, water, and food waste in its buildings.

Keep reading here on Tech Brew.—TC