Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Giant Eagle

The Food Tech Show: Walmart+ and Ghost Kitchen Robots

It may be the waning days of summer, but there’s still time to get outside for a walk and listen to podcasts and the Spoon team is here to help with our latest episode of The Food Tech Show.

This week, the team discusses the launch of the strategy behind Walmart+, Walmart’s long-rumored membership program centered around grocery and food which will now launch on September 15th.

Other stories discussed on the podcast include:

You can subscribe to the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or wherever you listen. If you’re a regular listener, we’d really appreciate a review!

You can also listen by clicking play below or downloading direct to your device.

Giant Eagle Launches Cashierless Checkout Using Grabango’s Tech

Grabango announced today that its cashierless checkout technology is now publicly launched at grocery retailer Giant Eagle’s GetGo Cafe+Market. This is the first commercial launch for Grabango’s technology.

Giant Eagle announced its partnership with Grabango last July, though we didn’t know at that time how the technology would be implemented. The first location to use Grabango will be the GetGo Café+Market in Fox Chapel, which serves the Pittsburgh, PA area. At just 3,000 sq. ft, the GetGo space is smaller than a full-sized grocery store, which is an important detail since the cashierless checkout concept still faces questions around scalability and affordability.

To use the new cashierless checkout, GetGo customers will need to download the Grabango app for iOS or Android and connect it to a payment system (like a credit card). Once all that’s done, customers just enter the store like normal — there’s no check in or special turnstile to scan the phone. Shoppers grab what they want and cameras throughout the store keep track of what is picked up and put back (the system does not use facial recognition). When customers are done, the app generates a special code that is scanned on the way out which automatically applies the charges and sends a receipt.

Grabango is the latest cashierless checkout company to announce a public installation. Last week Mastercard announced a partnership with Accel Robotics for a cashierless checkout solution that will be used at Circle K and Dunkin stores. Zippin recently transformed part of a Azbuka Vkusa grocery store in Moscow into a cashierless experience. And earlier this year Amazon, which pioneered cashierless checkout, opened up its Go Grocery store in Seattle, which features the grab-and-go technology.

With the pandemic still in effect throughout the world, we will likely see more announcements like these in the coming months. Grocery stores have already put measures like plexiglass shields and pay terminal sterilizing in place to help protect customers and cashiers from the virus. Removing the human-to-human checkout process altogether is a natural extension of those protections. With the influx of grocery e-commerce those cashiers could be kept at work picking e-commerce orders and doing customer service.

In today’s press announcement, which was emailed to The Spoon, Grabango said that it has been deploying its checkout systems to “the world’s largest grocery and convenience store chains since early 2019,” so this is definitely not the last we’ve heard from them.

Giant Eagle Announces Partnership with Grabango for Checkout-Free Shopping

Sometimes an announcement of news is as important as the news itself. This is the case with the announcement today that grocery retailer Giant Eagle has partnered with Grabango and will implement the latter’s checkout-free shopping at its stores.

There weren’t a lot of details outside of the press release, so we don’t know where the technology has been installed or when consumers will actually be able to use it. But Grabango CEO Will Glaser told me by phone, “This is not a proof of concept. This is to show that the technology has already been through proof of concept and works with [Giant Eagle’s] operations.”

And this is where the announcement of the news is equally as important as the news itself. Grabango (gruh-BANG-go) is among a host of startups looking to retrofit existing grocery stores with checkout-free shopping experiences — that is, where shoppers walk into a store, pick out what they want and leave, getting charged automatically on their way out.

Grabango, which raised $12 million in January, uses a combination of lots of small cameras mounted on a store’s ceiling along with computer vision and AI to keep track of what a person is taking. The company also integrates with a store’s existing checkout systems so a shopper could either walk out and pay via app or just pay the total to a traditional cashier on their way out with a credit card or cash.

Companies like Standard Cognition, Caper, Zippin and Trigo Vision are all in various states of pilot testing their particular cashierless checkout solutions with different retailers.

But so far only Grabango and Trigo Vision have named the retailers they are working with publicly. Grabango’s news follows Trigo Vision’s announcement last November that it would partner with Israeli supermarket chain Shufersal (and is rumored to be working with Tesco). The fact that these two retailers are now on the record with these partnerships highlights their confidence in those technologies and signals they are one step closer to actual and broader implementation.

As Albertsons VP of eCommerce, Trung Nguyen, said at Articulate, our food automation conference, grocers want technology solutions that already show they can work at scale. And big grocery chains are looking to implement this type of cashierless checkout innovation as Amazon continues to roll out its cashierless Go stores, and Walmart launched its fast lane checkout and high-tech IRL store, which features lots of cameras and computer vision for inventory management.

There are a lot of grocery stores around the world, so there probably won’t be a winner-take-all scenario for one cashierless checkout company. But Giant Eagle coming out and saying that it is partnering with Grabango and that its solution is ready for prime time is a big, well, Giant Eagle feather in Grabango’s cap.

Grocer Giant Eagle to Spread Its Robotic Wings

There was a time when all you needed to make your grocery store stand out was a better selection of food. Those quaint days are gone as any food retailer worth its sel de mer now needs robots. Whether they are in the storeroom or out and about in the aisles, all the cool kids are getting robots: Albertsons, Kroger, Stop & Shop, and Walmart, to name a few.

Regional grocery chain Giant Eagle evidently got the robo-memo and will soon have its own automaton sailing up and down its rows of products. TribLive reports that Tally, a shelf-scanning robot, will be working at Giant Eagle checking inventory, identifying items put back in the wrong place and verifying price tags. Data collected by Tally can also provide insightful analytics about purchases, store presentation and inventory to store management. The robot, built by Simbe, has actually already been in use in pilot programs at a number of Giant Eagle locations in the Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Akron.

Same as just about every other grocery chain that adds robots to the roster, Giant Eagle insists that Tally won’t be taking any human jobs. Instead, the robot will assist humans by taking over tedious, time-consuming tasks (like going up and down the aisles, checking inventory).

Giant Eagle’s announcement comes just days after Walmart announced it was greatly expanding its robot program, adding shelf-scanning bots to 300 locations, as well as floor scrubbing robots to more than 1,000 stores. It also follows Ahold Delhaize’s news in January that it was deploying 500 “Marty” robots to scan for spills in its Giant Foods and Stop & Shop stores.

For those who keep track of this sort of thing, each of these robots is made by a different manufacturer. As noted earlier, Giant Eagles’ bot is made by Simbe, Walmart’s shelf-scanner is made by Bossa Nova and Ahold Delhaize ordered robots from Badger Technologies. In addition to keeping tabs on which grocers go robotic, we’ll also need to see which robots they are buying (and from whom) to see if there is a particular automated solution that is working better for retailers.

It should be noted, however, that the days of the shelf-scanning robot could be numbered. There are a number of companies building cashierless checkout systems that use hundreds of tiny cameras mounted to the ceiling which not only keep track of what people buy, but also give the store a continuous, real-time snapshot of shelf inventory. This sort of setup would be faster than waiting for a robot to make its rounds.

The fact that so many grocery stores are adding robots is just one of the reasons we created the ArticulATE food automation summit, happening next week in San Francisco. We’ll actually be talking food retail with Albertsons to see how robots play into its overall playbook. Tickets are just about gone, but you can still grab one today!