Even if you’ve never been to an Albertsons, then you’ve almost certainly been to a store in the Albertsons family of brands.

One of the largest retail employers in the United States, the company has more than 2,200 stores, 402 stations, 22 distribution centers, 19 manufacturing plants, and almost 300,000 employees spread across 34 states. Supermarkets that Americans across the country visit every day — including Safeway, Vons, and Acme stores — fall under the Albertsons umbrella of companies. The scope of the Albertsons operation is astounding: the company serves 35 million customers per week and has almost 32 million rewards members.

All of which makes data, both to manage its business and to delight customers, that much more important to Albertsons. In an interview with the Enterprise Software Innovators podcast, Albertsons CIO Anuj Dhanda underscored the importance of data to Albertsons’s business, saying that “the precision of the data [Albertsons uses] is expanding, very significantly.” He also noted the importance of personalizing experiences for customers. “That would be the winning strategy for the customer and for us,” said Dhanda.

Indeed, a top trend shaping the grocery market is “ongoing pressure to deliver value to consumers” according to McKinsey. In light of high inflation (18% between December 2020 and December 2023), “reducing spending remains a top priority for shoppers,” leading to a “heightened interest in discounts,” the McKinsey report notes.

To deliver value to their customers, and to share discount offers with them in milliseconds, Albertsons turned to MongoDB Atlas Search.

By integrating the database, search engine, and sync mechanism into a single, unified, and fully managed platform, Atlas Search is the fastest and easiest way to build relevance-based search capabilities directly into applications. By making data more discoverable, usable, and valuable, Atlas Search helps boost engagement and improve customer satisfaction.

Specifically, MongoDB Atlas Search powers Albertsons’s massive promotions engine platform, which gives e-commerce customers real-time offers while they’re shopping for groceries online.

“With Atlas Search, Albertsons was able to eliminate a search engine and an in-memory cache, simplifying their architecture in the process,” said Sahir Azam, MongoDB’s chief product officer, during the 2023 MongoDB.local NYC keynote. “Now they are managing over 50,000 unique products in over 2,000 stores, and delivering half a million promotions at any given time to millions of end users.”

To learn more about how MongoDB Atlas helps organizations of all sizes accelerate and simplify how they build with data — and how MongoDB Atlas Search helps organizations build relevance-based search capabilities directly into applications — check out Atlas and Atlas Search.