Retail is a strong co-operative sector across Europe, and the UK Co-op Retail Conference brought in participants from Italian, Danish, Czech, and Slovak co-ops to share their experiences on how digital innovation can drive engagement.
Co-ops adapt to their markets, delegates heard, and see digital as a vital tool to connect with members. Approaches vary, but a common theme was keeping people at the heart of digital decision-making.
Anders Felbo Pold, head of loyalty and digital customer experience at Coop Denmark, described how the organisation operates over 900 stores across four brands, serving more than 2 million members. A major driver of the business in recent years has been its Coop App, which now has 850,000 monthly users and features personal offers, games, scan-and-pay, and bonus schemes.
The app was built by Lobyco, a Danish tech co-op that grew out of Coop Denmark’s digital team. Lobyco – which sponsored the conference – develops loyalty and promotion tools and works with several UK co-op retailers, including OurCoop, East of England and Channel Islands. “As co-operators, we need to deliver digital solutions for our members, and we need to do that in partnership with other co-ops,” said Pold.
Co-operatives also need to “be relevant for different economic segments”, he added. To that end, Co-op Denmark has introduced a 5% cashback offer on all fruit and veg purchases, a subscription model where members decide how much to add to their account each month, and games in the app. It now has over 40 million game sessions annually. “We recently removed a Wordle game and were overwhelmed by customers who said, ‘Don’t stop it! Bring it back!’ So this is something that brings a little joy to everyday shopping.”
Piero Ingrosso shared how Legacoop, the Italian federation representing more than 10,000 co-operative enterprises from all sectors, supports 7 million members and 470,000 employees. “It’s a huge ecosystem with different needs in terms of digitalisation and engagement,” he said, “but Legacoop supports all the cooperative enterprises through the process of digital transformation and education via the Pico Foundation, which was created by Legacoop and Coopfond.”
In Italy, co-ops are legally required to share 3% of any surplus with a mutual fund (such as CoopFond), which is then reinvested into co-operative development.
Ingrosso also sits on the board of Allianza 3.0, the biggest consumer co-op in Italy. The emphasis in both organisations, he said, is human-centred innovation, with the biggest upcoming challenge being artificial intelligence. “AI is going to change everything and will have a massive impact on several areas of our business, including consumer and members engagement,” he said. The project has received interest and support from the UN.
Delegates also heard a video contribution from Gabriele Tubertini, participatory director of another Italian consumer co-op, Coop Italia. Ten years ago, he was the project manager for the Supermarket of the Future, developed for the 2015 Milan Expo.
“It was so ahead that, in my opinion, it’s still a futuristic vision of how a supermarket can work,” he said. This includes a layout that links warehouse positioning to the shop floor, low shelves that allow face-to-face human interaction, and digital screens that, through motion detection, display information on products a customer points at.
“Sometimes being a co-operative slows down the adoption of technology because it is often perceived as a threat to the workforce,” he said – but at the same time, “as co-operatives, we have a responsibility when we introduce new technologies, and we can’t be too enthusiastic in adopting technologies that don’t have the man in the loop.”
In a video message from the Czech Republic, Skupina Co-op‘s vice chair, Lukáš Němčík, described how the organisation supports 35 consumer co-operatives operating 2,400 stores, with one key innovation being a hybrid model of autonomous 24/7 stores. These stores are staffed during the day and accessible at all other times to those over 18 via a member app-generated QR code.
“In the small towns of up to 500 people, it’s actually the only way to keep the service of food sales present,” he said. Thefts in these stores are lower, with purchases and customer health monitored by AI. Remote rural stores include cafes and seating areas where the community can gather. The hybrid stores won the digitalisation category at the European Commerce Awards 2025.
“We were so proud of this award, because it demonstrated that consumer co-operatives, which are generally taken as very traditional, can actually be very innovative, added Němčík. “I think it’s good to try to think out of the box, because many times we try to be safe. But on the other if you try to risk it can be beneficial.”
The model works particularly well in this market, he added, because the Czech Republic has such a low unemployment rate (2.8%) and many small, rural communities.
Renata Petovska shared a similar story via video from Slovakia, where Coop Jednota worked closely with the Czech co-ops to develop the stores. Coop Jednota runs 2,000 retail outlets and has 1 million registered members in a country of 5.5 million people. Here, people feel loyalty and ownership of the hybrid spaces, she said, giving the example of a man who purchased a bottle of beer, but accidentally smashed a few more. He paid for everything – including the broken bottles – “and then, watching the camera, 20 minutes later, he comes back to clean the mess!”
Slovakia has 25 regional co-operatives, and “if you want to have one solution fitting all, then it’s going to be Mission Impossible or Never Ending Story,” said Petovska. Their answer is to trial innovative pilot programmes, many of which are driven by their 1,300 local suppliers. “This strong pioneer spirit is something which unites us as it’s easier to experiment with us as a co-op than another organisation that has two or three other layers of decision making – it’s a platform for creativity and for playing around.”
Although these hybrid stores worked well in some markets, they don’t in others, including Denmark. “We’ve seen plenty of retailers trying to test it,” said Pold. “No one has succeeded yet.” This, he added, is partly because Denmark has low rural populations and very strong infrastructure.
For Legacoop, the question of customer loyalty is entwined with value. ”If I am looking to introduce technology as a co-operative, what is the value for the consumer, for the member, and how can they perceive that value?” asked Ingrosso. “But on the other side, we need to understand what the impact will be on our organisation and our workforce. This is the very strong challenge we need to face: try to find the balance.”
