Retail Daily Minute | Starbucks Posts Back-to-Back Traffic Growth, Ahold Delhaize Launches Click2Cart & Gap Taps AI for Supply Chain Traceability

Hello everyone, I am Chris Walton and you are listening to the Retail Daily Minute, your quickest, fastest breakdown of all the day's top retail news. Today is April 30th, 2026. I am remote in the Berlin airport getting ready to head home after two weeks in Europe. And boy, am I ready to give a big kiss and a hug to my two rug rats. This edition is brought to you with the help and support of Duvo. Someone on your operations team is likely copying and pasting data between systems right now. Who knows, you might even be doing it while you're listening to this podcast. So why not let Duvo do that work instead? To learn more, visit duvo.ai. That's D-U-V-O dot A-I. Today, we've got news on Ajo Deleuze's new move to meet shoppers wherever they are online and GapInk's push to bring AI into global supply chain. But we begin today with Starbucks, which delivered a turnaround quarter that is turning heads. Starbucks reported second quarter earnings and revenue that beat analysts' estimates, posting adjusted earnings per share of 50 cents against expectations of 43 cents. with net revenues climbing 9% to $9.5 billion. More importantly, this marks the company's second consecutive quarter of traffic growth, which is exactly the signal CEO Brian Nichol and his back-to-Starbucks strategy needed. Global comparable store sales increased 6.2%, driven by a 3.8% lift in comparable transactions and a 2.3% increase in average ticket. In North America, comps were even stronger at 7.1%, with U.S. comparable transactions up 4.3%, an average ticket up 2.7%. The company also raised its full outlook for both comparable earnings and same sales growth a sign that leadership believes the momentum is real and sustainable The Back to Starbucks initiative has been fundamentally about resetting the customer experience fixing wait times, getting back to handcrafted quality, and rebuilding the in-store environment that once made Starbucks a destination rather than just another drive-through stop. Two consecutive quarters of traffic growth suggest that work is resonating with customers. That said, there are real pressures in the numbers worth watching. North American operating margin contracted from 11.6% to 9.9%, driven by labor investments tied directly to the back-to-Starbucks strategy, product mix shifts, and inflation headwinds from tariffs and elevated coffee pricing. CFO Kathy Smith acknowledged more work remains, but framed it correctly. Top-line improvement comes first, margin expansion follows. Internationally, China remains a challenging market with comps barely positive at 0.5%, underscoring that the recovery is not yet a global story. Now, before we get to our next headline, let's take a quick break to hear about another one of our sponsors, Miracle. Miracle is the catalyst of commerce. Over 450 retailers are opening new revenue streams with marketplaces, dropship, and retail media and succeeding. With Miracle, unlock more products, more partners, and more profits without the heavy lifting. What's holding you back? Visit Miracle.com, that's M-I-R-A-K-L.com to learn more. all right we are back and our next headline has to do with ajo de lez usa rolling out a new digital capability called click to cart developed in partnership with software firm smart commerce which lets shoppers add products to their Ajo Delez cart directly from digital ads social media and brand channels even when those platforms have nothing to do with Ajo Delez itself. The mechanics are straightforward, but the strategic ambition is significant. A customer scrolling Instagram seeing a CPG brand's ad can now click directly from that ad into their Stop & Shop or Giant or Food Lion cart without ever navigating to the retailer's own website. The capability spans all five of Ajo Delez's U.S. banners and includes a functionality that lets shoppers select the preferred Ajo Delez USA banner at the moment of ad. This matters because it collapses the discovery to purchase funnel in a way that traditional digital grocery shopping has never quite managed to do. The context here is also important. Ajo Delez USA grew U.S. online sales 22.8% in Q4 of fiscal 2025 and achieved e-commerce profitability on a fully allocated basis in the first half of last year. Milestones that very few traditional grocers can claim. Click to cart is a logical next step for a company that has earned the right to be aggressive about digital growth. What I find particularly interesting is the CPG angle. Ahold Deleuze USA is explicitly framing this as a tool that gives CPG brands new ways to connect their campaigns to shoppable experiences. Which means this is as much a retail media and supplier monetization play as it is a consumer convenience feature. For grocery retailers still trying to figure out how to monetize digital traffic and deepen CBG brand partnerships this new Ajo Delez model deserves some serious attention And finally we close today with Gap Inc announcing a collaboration with AI supply chain software provider Inspectorio to advance product traceability and data collection across its global supplier network Gap is deploying Inspectorio's AI layer called Paramo, which supports quality compliance, lab testing, and traceability operations using agents and co-pilots. In practice, Paramo is designed to boost coordination across Gap's supplier network by improving supplier KPIs, reducing the risk of regulatory or product safety events, and driving operational efficiency and cost savings. The technology highlights trends in partner performance against compliance requirements, enhances quality inspection processes, and automates corrective and preventative action workflows. All things that, in a more manual world, create enormous drag on apparel supply chains. The investment in Inspectorio's Parammo platform reads as a defensive play as much as an offensive one, getting ahead of compliance risk while building the data infrastructure that more sophisticated supply chain decisions require. What I find also notable is that Gap is not alone in this. Dick's Sporting Goods tapped Inspectorio in 2024 to increase supplier engagement and monitor production processes, and Mango has been using Inspectorio's lab test management tool to digitize sourcing operations. Generally, when you see multiple retailers converging on the same platform, it's usually a signal that the underlying problem is real and the solution could be working. For Gap specifically, better supply chain data collection could also feed downstream improvements in inventory management and allocation areas where I know firsthand apparel retailers perpetually leave margin on the table. That's all for today. Thanks for tuning in. Once again, this has been OmniTalk Retail. I am Chris Walton, and as always, be careful out there.