# Kroger — Making Real-Time Local Inventory Fast Across Thousands of Stores

> Kroger's grocery delivery platform shows you what's in stock at your local store — right now, not yesterday. Doing that fast and accurately at scale is harder than it sounds. We fixed the database bottlenecks that were making it slow.

## Project context

- Client: Kroger
- Industry: Grocery Retail
- Year: 2023

## Challenge

Catalog pages were slow under sustained concurrent load — the data showed unindexed joins across three large tables hitting full scans under load. Bulk inventory sync operations from stores were acquiring table-level locks, creating read latency spikes for all users during sync windows. Every peak period meant degraded performance.

## Solution

Three-part fix: composite indexes on all product×store×category query patterns; inventory pipeline rewritten with row-level locking to eliminate sync-window latency spikes; Redis caching on all catalog browse paths with TTL matched to the inventory sync cadence. The database now handles peak concurrent load without degradation, and inventory sync no longer impacts read performance.

## Services

- Web Development

## Published results

- fast Catalog page load (peak) (vs unacceptable before)
- eliminated Inventory sync latency impact (row-level locking)
- high Cache hit rate (catalog browse) (Redis layer)
- 2,700+ Stores supported (real-time inventory each)

## Benefits

- Composite indexing on all catalog query hot paths
- Row-level locking — sync writes don't block reads
- Redis cache TTL matched to inventory sync cadence
- Scales to 2,700+ stores with individual real-time stock

## Source and contact

- Canonical project page: https://qualityx.co/en/portfolio/kroger-grocery-platform
- Discuss a related project on WhatsApp: https://wa.me/905392376734