Pricing-tech firm Ladle has promoted Steve Miller to Executive Vice President, Grocery Pricing Operations, giving him unified command over sales, customer onboarding, support, and software development for the company's grocery segment — including the Storewise by Ladle product suite.
Miller reports directly to CEO Todd Gebski and takes on responsibility for accelerating growth across StoreKeeper, ReceiptKeeper, and the forthcoming ReceiptKeeper AI, a tool designed to let retailers scan or photograph vendor invoices and automate much of the receiving workflow.
Miller's Background
Miller brings decades of supply-chain and back-office automation experience to the role, highlighted by 12 years as a grocery wholesaler CIO. That tenure, working across retailers, wholesalers, and direct-store-delivery vendors, is central to why Ladle consolidated its grocery organization under him now. "Steve brings a rare combination of grocery industry experience, technology expertise and a deep understanding of how retailers, wholesalers and vendors work together," Gebski said.
For convenience-store operators and independent grocers alike, the management hurdles Miller knows well — manual price-book maintenance, invoice reconciliation, DSD vendor sprawl — consume significant labor hours at the store level. StoreKeeper addresses that by connecting retailers directly with wholesale and DSD vendors while automating pricing updates; ReceiptKeeper extends that automation into the receiving dock and vendor-management functions. The AI-assisted receiving layer, still in pre-release, would further shrink the gap between invoice arrival and shelf-price accuracy.
What It Means for Operators
Independent grocers and smaller c-store chains face compressing margins on the inside with fewer back-office resources to absorb complexity, a dynamic NACS and FMI data have consistently flagged as a top operational burden for single-store operators and small regional chains. Ladle's pitch — purpose-built automation rather than enterprise software retrofitted downmarket — positions Storewise squarely against that pressure.
"Independent grocers operate in an incredibly demanding environment, and technology should make running their stores easier, not add more complexity," Miller said. "We have an opportunity to automate more of the work that consumes retailers' time, strengthen the connections between retailers, wholesalers and vendors, and give independent grocers technology built around the way they actually operate."
Ladle's broader portfolio, which also includes ComplianceMate for food-safety compliance and MeazureUp for foodservice operations audits, serves restaurants, grocers, and convenience-store operators — making the grocery pricing push one lane of a wider operator-tech strategy. For c-store buyers evaluating back-of-house and pricing technology, the Storewise roadmap is worth tracking as ReceiptKeeper AI moves toward general release.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
