4 tech things used in grocery retail
The digital shopping experience is not only experienced online anymore. The digital age has made it into the physical stores for real the last couple of years. The pandemic also forced a shift to online shopping and in-store retail needs to win them back, and they are using tech to do so. Here are some of the tech stuff that helps save food waste, saves money and enhances customers shopping experiences.
Self-checkouts
Self-checkouts as a concept is not very new but they recently become a lot more advanced. Customers increasingly value the safety, speed, and convenience offered by self-checkout. The service can, if it works smoothly, reduce friction for consumers and free up employees for other more important tasks such as stocking or customer assistance. The newer parts of the self-checkout is visual analytics, specifically AI and camera vision that helps address the increase of errors and theft that is more occurring with a self-checkout system. Some retailers also use mobile tech to let the customer scan with their own devices, and then we have Amazon Go that takes it so far that they just *feel* what you took in the store and charges you for it. I don’t know if that’s scary or great? Maybe both.
Autonomous delivery robots
To be able to offer fast deliveries some stores use delivery robots. One of them is Tesco. The grocery delivery service, which is powered by zero carbon electricity, is responsible for mobilising small white robots to transport items from shop to home. The robots can detect sidewalks and manoeuvre common obstacles to get where they're going. During the pandemic most of the big chains started offering home deliveries of different kinds.
Electronic shelf labels
ESLs have been around for a while in many grocery stores but they seem to get more functions and integration possibilities all the time. ESLs offer the customers a more visual and interactive shopping experience and takes away many manual steps for the staff in the store. I think we’ll see a lot of creative use of ELSs in the future.
Dynamic Pricing
The huge amount of data available to make decisions on keep on growing and this helps with setting the optimal prices to ensure both maximal profit and maximal sell-through. We have a blog post explaining dynamic pricing more thoroughly here.
Grocers in 2022 must stay on their toes to not be left behind. Technology will be a critical enabler to stay relevant and ahead of the competition. These 4 examples are just scratching the surface of what's available, but this won't be last update here on this matter. Stay tuned!
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