Schwarz Digital: Inside the Innovation Engine Behind Lidl & Kaufland
I sat down with Mirko Saul, Senior Vice President of Innovation at Schwarz Digital, the technology and innovation engine behind the Schwarz Group, owner of Lidl and Kaufland.
Hey Everyone,
This week, I’m bringing you a conversation that goes deep into the real mechanics of innovation at scale. I sat down in Cologne with Mirko Saul, Senior Vice President of Innovation at Schwarz Digital, the technology and innovation engine behind the Schwarz Group — owner of Lidl, Kaufland, and more than 14,000 stores globally.
We covered a LOT of ground — and honestly, this is one of the most eye-opening conversations I’ve had on how innovation actually works inside a retail giant. Here’s what we got into:
🔹 Lab Stores & Test Culture: How Schwarz Group builds replica supermarkets (without customers) to test technologies like self-checkout, computer vision, and robotics before ever entering a live store.
🔹 Sovereign Tech Stack: Why the company built its own cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity stack, and partnered with Aleph Alpha for AI — all to ensure full sovereignty and compliance with European data laws.
🔹 AI in Action: From multilingual customer service chatbots to food recognition at checkout, computer vision for loss prevention, and automated content creation — we discussed real-world AI applications already improving operations.
🔹 Digital Twins & Robotics: Why Schwarz Group is creating 3D replicas of every item in-store, and how robotics could reshape inventory movement, cleaning, and even restocking in the future.
🔹 The Hard Truth About Scaling: Mirko shares why most startups underestimate the realities of retail-scale deployment — from integration to compliance to support — and how Schwarz evaluates what’s truly scalable.
🔹 Leadership Lessons: From managing resistance to change, to measuring ROI, to building a culture where experimentation and failure are part of the process — this is innovation without the fluff.
“You can build the best tech in the world, but if it doesn’t fit our infrastructure or scale across 30 countries, it won’t work.” – Mirko Saul
This is a must-listen for anyone working in retail, enterprise tech, or innovation. It’s not about buzzwords — it’s about how the world’s most operationally complex retailers build for the future.
🎧 Listen now: OFFBounds.tv
📍 Recorded in Cologne, Germany
🎙 Hosted by Paula Macaggi
Huge thanks to VTEX for sponsoring this episode — the enterprise commerce platform trusted by CIOs and CEOs to reduce total cost of ownership by 50% and move faster.
See you next week,
Paula