Independent grocers have historically sat outside the retail media conversation.

Not because they lack shoppers or transactions, but because they’ve been fragmented. Different systems, uneven digital capabilities, and no shared way for national brands to transact across independents at scale made participation impractical, even when demand existed.

Retail media can work at small scale when transactions and closed-loop measurement exist. But without aggregation and access, measurement alone doesn’t unlock sustained demand. National brands can’t plan or activate store by store across hundreds or thousands of independents.

That’s what’s starting to change.

In this episode of The Middlemen, we talk with Ravi Achanta (RSA America) and Garry Church (Inmar Intelligence) about why it took two platforms to make independent grocery workable for retail media. One aggregates loyalty audiences and digital infrastructure across independent retailers. The other connects that aggregated supply to national CPG demand through incentives and activation.

This isn’t about launching another retail media network. It’s about making a fragmented segment reachable for the first time — and understanding what had to exist before retail media could even work at this tier.

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