Dive Brief:
- Albertsons announced Wednesday the launch of Celebrations, a digital hub for party planning available across all of its banners’ websites and apps.
- The platform aims to make party planning easier by allowing customers to customize elements of their events and explore curated party inspiration.
- Celebrations is Albertsons latest digital innovation as the company continues to lean into AI to boost shopping experiences and operations.
Dive Insight:
The debut of Celebrations underscores Albertsons’ ongoing efforts to make digital shopping not only convenient, but intuitive and personalized for its customers.
Celebrations integrates Albertsons AI shopping assistant to help customers navigate the platform with tailored recommendations. The digital hub aims to save shoppers time by letting them plan and buy party items, such as food, decorations, florals, catering and gifts, “in minutes.”
The digital platform allows people to customize cakes, shop by party themes or for individual decorations and choose from a variety of catering options and recipes. They can also access exclusive offerings for Albertsons’ private label lines, add personalized notes to orders and more.
The digital platform offers both delivery and pickup fulfillment options, and is tailored to let users browse party inspiration intermittently, according to the announcement.
“We’re enhancing the shopping experience for our customers by adding the capability to plan entire celebrations with the same ease as ordering their weekly groceries,” Jill Pavlovich, Albertsons’ senior vice president of digital customer experience, said in a statement.
In December, Albertsons debuted a new offsite shopping capability that, like Celebrations, aims to streamline the online shopping experience. The feature allows consumers to add products, recipes, coupons or offers from offsite media like display ads, shoppable content, connected TV and social media to their online Albertsons carts.
On the AI front, Albertsons debuted its agentic AI shopping feature, which is integrated into the Celebrations platform, in December. The feature can generate meal plans and shopping lists, reorder frequent purchases, find relevant recipes for users, import recipes from images and curate product ideas based on themes.
