Ahold Delhaize USA will transition its private label items to "cleaner and more natural" ingredients by 2025. Artificial flavors, synthetic colors and high-fructose corn syrup are among the ingredients that the company will remove from its products.

Walmart has switched its stores to a less-expensive floor wax that requires less buffing, a move that will save the retailer more than $20 million a year, Chief Financial Officer Brett Biggs said. The company is focused on small changes to create big savings -- swapping out fluorescent bulbs for LED lights over time is forecast to ultimately save $200 million.

Target opened its first Dallas-area small-format store on Wednesday, with a full-size beauty department and scaled-down versions of other merchandise categories. The 55,000-square-foot store sells beer and wine, and departments are arranged for convenience and tailored to local tastes.

Sears Chairman and hedge fund manager Edward Lampert predicted the e-commerce future when he combined Sears and Kmart, but the company never had the money needed to compete with Amazon and Walmart, he said this week. "If you had predicted the future relatively correctly and you still didn't produce the outcome you wanted, that is different than not predicting correctly," he said.

Macy's has added virtual reality headsets in its furniture departments in 70 stores and will debut them in 20 more locations early next year. The headsets let shoppers browse a wider selection of pieces than can be stocked in the store, and see how the furniture would look in their homes.

Google and Microsoft are working on improving the streaming game experience, with Google rolling out a beta version of its Project Stream and Microsoft announcing its own Project xCloud initiative. Both developments could change the gaming industry, as consumers are better able to use high-end games with the services.

Many sports teams are using immersive technology to provide better experiences for fans, with the Sacramento Kings and the New York Jets taking advantage of such innovations. This development is supported by the creation of tech-enabled stadiums such as the Golden 1 Center, which boasts a 6,000-square-foot data center, allowing fans to access the bandwidth of the equivalent of 17,000 homes.

To create the sustainable future necessary for large-scale food production, General Mills is reinventing farming with a look back at classic methods like regenerative farming. "We consider this form of returning to some of our old practices a form of innovation," said Carla Vernon, president of General Mills' natural and organic operating unit.

Arm and Cybereason, two SoftBank-backed companies, are developing a way to prevent hacking of household appliances. These devices are particularly vulnerable, as consumers rarely replace logins and passwords; the companies hope to prevent attacks by monitoring systems for suspicious activity.

Instant Games, an HTML5-based gaming platform created by Facebook, will be added to both Facebook Lite and several gaming groups in the near future. Facebook reported that the platform saw a 25% increase in daily active people from June to September and that it hosted 1.7 billion gaming sessions during the past month.