Foodservice

• Domino’s new rewards programs rewards customers for purchasing any pizza through its app that leverages AI technology to identify a pizza as a pizza.

• Dunkin’ Brands commented that it has moved much of its infrastructure over to Amazon Web Services’ public cloud, a process it began in 2017.

• Chipotle is building drive-thru lanes for the first time to meet mobile order demand. The lanes will be used exclusively for order-ahead app customers.

• Chipotle digital sales grew to nearly $500 million in 2018.

• Good Times Burgers & Frozen Custard has partnered with Valyant AI (Denver, CO) to implement AI-order taking as a trial in a Denver-area drive thru to speed up order taking.

Retail

• Amazon.com Inc. has entered into an agreement to acquire San Francisco-based smart home products company Eero.

• Lowe’s is getting out of the connected device business, having announced that it would no longer operate the Iris smart home platform after the end of March.

• Samsung opened its first 3 retail stores in the US. They landed in L.A., Long Island and Houston and are highly experiential.

• Target Corporation will soon start allowing customers to complete transactions via the Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay mobile payment apps. In addition, the discount giant will accept contactless cards from Mastercard, Visa, American Express and Discover.

Grocery/Convenience

• Speedway LLC announced customers can now use Apple Pay to checkout at all of its stores nationwide.

Drug/Health/Beauty

• Cardinal Health Inc. named Brian Rice as Exec VP and CIO.

Just because we don’t mention it here doesn’t mean it didn’t happen – or we didn’t capture it. In the past four weeks, we’ve updated more than 570 companies in the Database of Foodservice Technology and Database of Retail Technology, with many of those companies’ records updated at multiple points.