Whole Foods Takes Retail to the Cloud

Whole Foods (NASDAQ:WFM) and Infor are teaming up to change retail. The high-end grocery chain and business enterprise software company are building a cloud-based platform designed to enhance the customer buying experience and help with its supply chain.

“Things have changed. Computing technology is a lot cheaper. We are going to use cloud computing for massively available storage, massively available compute power and so you can do things with predictive analytics and science to change the way retail works instead of these manual processes. So all these systems that we use today were pre-commerce, pre-social, pre-mobile none of those things were [contemplated] 20 years ago -- we’re going to bring all that together with [a] single platform for visibility,” said Infor CEO Charles Phillips to FOX Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo.

Whole Foods CEO Walter Robb explained how the platform makes the buying process more efficient.

“Imagine if you are picking up a head of cauliflower -- and this platform allows you to actually have a video from the supplier saying ‘here this is how this cauliflower was grown.’ This is the ultimate endgame of matching up this platform with our product attributes [and] our product quality.”

Robb said the product has “potential” to create the “richer buying experience.”

“This system will allow us to actually know exactly what you bought, what day you bought it on, how to make sure it’s replenished appropriately… It will take a couple of years to get there but that’s the sort of potential,” he said.