Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

smart cart

Big Tech Set Its Sights on Reinventing Checkout. Consumers Said ‘Not So Fast’

When it comes to technology and grocery shopping, one primary focus for grocery chains and technology providers in recent years has been the checkout experience.

Amazon and various other technology companies have been developing platforms to enable consumers to skip the checkout counter. These platforms aim to transform the shopping experience into something akin to walking into a giant pantry, loading up your cart, and then walking out without going through a checkout line.

Others (including Amazon) pushed technology into the shopping cart, enabling customers to check out products as they walked through the store, get coupons and ads for special deals, and learn more about items via a built-in touchscreen.

And then there’s online grocery shopping. After two decades of slow adoption by both grocers and shoppers, a pandemic forced every major grocery chain to invest heavily in enabling the easiest of all grocery buying options: letting us shop at home and have our groceries delivered to our door.

Meanwhile, everyday consumers continue to do things the way we’ve always done things. It’s a lazy Sunday, and you’re in no hurry? Get in line and chat it up with the cashier and bagger. Are you hurrying to return to work or arrive home in time for dinner? Jump into the self-checkout line and get out as soon as possible. Too busy to head to the grocery store at all? Order online and have stuff delivered to your home.

In other words, grocery shoppers are not a monolith. Most of us change our behavior depending on the current situation.

But what about Just Walk Out? It’s a radically tech-forward evolution of checkout, but one in which Amazon appears to have widely overestimated just how many people would use it and how easy it would be to implement. As I said in last week’s Food Tech News Show (FTNS), self-checkout fits most shoppers’ needs when they are in a hurry, and there aren’t that many situations where consumers feel they need to skip checkout altogether.

As for self-checkout, it definitely isn’t perfect and could be made a much better experience. As Scott Heimendinger said on the FTNS, self-checkout can sometimes be unnecessarily difficult, almost like plugging in a USB. Amazon and others should probably spend their time using technology to make self-checkout work better.

We love robots - FTNS

Target is doing something about self-checkout, changes which it claims will allow shoppers to get out quicker. According to the company, self-checkout lines with cameras were able to check out twice as fast as self-checkout lines without a camera. Of course, their motivation is mostly somewhat self-motivated, driven by the retailer’s desire to limit theft, so my guess is there’s a good chance they can bungle the rollout if it doesn’t deliver clear benefits and customers are feeling spied on.

All that said, while some shoppers may not like it, the combination of computer vision and self-checkout might be the future, particularly if it makes the self-checkout experience less painful than it currently is. Because of this, Amazon should look at repurposing its Just Walk Out into a self-checkout accelerator, not a platform for making shoppers feel like they are shoplifting. For now, however, they’re emphasizing the rollout of their Dash shopping carts, a solution that is unclear if shoppers are asking for. Others, like Instacart, are also betting big on as well. The company had a blog post touting their progress today, saying they plan to have ‘thousands’ of shopping carts deployed by the end of 2024.

Just Walk Out and other light-touch self-checkout will thrive in the near term in shopping contexts where a consumer needs one or two items and is in a hurry, such as airports and stadiums. One of the smartest implementations I’ve seen with self-checkout is at Costa Coffee at SeaTac airport, where they had a Mashgin AI-powered self-checkout station with a dedicated line for customers who just wanted drip coffee. In other words, a quick and low-touch checkout solution for a product with a high degree of certainty where customers are often in a hurry.

The bottom line is that everyday shoppers will continue to shop the way they’ve become accustomed to, choosing between three primary methods: full-service checkout, self-checkout, and delivery. More advanced technology should primarily focus on improving these existing modes. New technology that allows (or forces) consumers to change their behavior should only be used in scenarios that make sense.

Otherwise, consumers will reject it, and retailers will be forced to retrench, just like we saw last week with Amazon’s pullback of Just Walk Out.

Instacart’s AI-Powered Shopping Cart Arrives at ShopRite and Fairway Market

Today Instacart announced that ShopRite in Spotswood, New Jersey, and Fairway Market in Kips Bay, Manhattan are the first two locations to deploy the company’s latest generation smart shopping cart.

The new Caper Cart, which the company announced last September, is the third generation of the AI-powered smart shopping cart platform and the first version of the cart built entirely on the watch of Instacart, which acquired Caper AI (the startup behind the Caper Cart) in October of 2021.

The updated Caper Cart has scales, sensors, touchscreens, and computer vision to enable self-checkout by the customer. Despite the added features, it is slimmer and lighter than the previous version and has 65% more capacity. Perhaps most important for grocers, the new cart system comes with stacked charging, allowing them to charge batches of carts at once and eliminating the need to charge carts individually or swap out batteries.

From the release:

To get started, customers at the ShopRite of Spotswood and the Fairway Market in New York City can grab a Caper Cart at the front end of the store. Powered by AI and computer vision technology, the Caper Cart recognizes and scans items as they are placed in the Cart, allowing customers to easily stay on budget with a running total shown on the screen. To checkout, customers simply scan the barcode displayed on the Cart’s screen at the store’s self-checkout area.

Instacart’s win with Wakefern Food Corp (a retailer-owned cooperative that includes ShopRite and Fairway Market) comes as its competitors in the smart shopping cart space continue to move forward. In January, smart cart startup Flow announced they’d inked a thousand shopping cart commitment from German retailer Expresso. A month later, Shopic announced they’d locked down a deal for two thousand smart carts with Israel-based grocery chain Shufersal. Stateside, Amazon has deployed its Dash cart to numerous locations.

Not all startups in the space have found the road easy, however. Seattle-based Veeve recently announced it was pivoting towards becoming an extension of grocery retailer media networks, using its in-store shopping cart add-ons as yet another digital screen to offer up promotions and ads to in-store shoppers.

According to Instacart, the carts are available at the ShopRite of Spotswood and will soon be introduced at the Fairway Market in Manhattan.

The Instacart Caper Cart Shopping Cart

Instacart Acquires Smart Cart and Grocery Checkout Technology Startup Caper AI

Today Instacart announced they had acquired Caper AI, a smart cart and grocery checkout technology company. Instacart confirmed to Techcrunch they paid $350 million for the company.

In Caper AI, Instacart acquires a portfolio of automated checkout and smart cart technology solutions, many of which are deployed in major national grocery retailers across North America. One such retailer is Kroger, which began deploying “KroGo Powered by Caper” smart shopping carts at a store in Kroger’s hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, earlier this year.

Caper’s latest generation smart carts feature machine vision that allows shoppers to place the items in the cart and bypass counter checkout altogether.

Caper also has an automated checkout solution targeted towards smaller format stores. The company’s AI Counter utilizes a scale and machine vision to recognize up to 10 items and automate the checkout process.

According to the announcement, Instacart plans on integrating Caper’s technology into the Instacart app as well as both its in-store and online experiences for its grocery partners. One interesting potential application hinted at is a shoppable recipe integration with Caper’s smart carts: “Over time, Instacart expects to integrate Caper’s technology into the Instacart app and the ecommerce websites and apps of its retail partners, allowing customers to build online shopping lists and browse recipes ahead of time and check off their lists as they go. And, for Instacart shoppers who shop on behalf of customers, they can also utilize the carts to find items more efficiently and bypass long checkout lines.”

With the move, Instacart adds another tool to a growing arsenal of e-commerce and in-store technology solutions targeted towards grocery providers at a time many are beginning to question their relationship with the company. Over the past decade, Instacart has provided many grocery chains an easier glide path for moving into e-commerce and in-store shopping automation, areas with steep learning curves that grocers with tight margins have historically been more than happy to outsource. However, some grocers see Instacart’s in-store shopping service as taking too big a cut and possibly disintermediating them in the process.

However, as Instacart grows its enterprise technology solutions, I expect we’ll increasingly see its flagship shopper service decoupled from its technology as it looks to serve larger retailers who want greater control over the customer relationship. Since the start of the pandemic, many grocery retailers have started to roll out and standardize around their delivery services, which means a fast-growing market for technology solutions. My guess is Instacart is anticipating this as it rolls up some of the best-in-class independent solution providers as it prepares for an IPO soon.

In short, this move and others are part of Instacart evolving into a more diversified omnichannel grocery technology arms dealer.

Podcast: The Future Grocery Store

While I may have missed my annual sojourn to sin city for CES this year, I may soon be able to get something akin to walking the Vegas strip just by heading on down to my local grocery store.

That’s because, at least according to The Spoon’s Chris Albrecht, grocery stores will soon resemble the floor of a casino with all the screens that will show up there in the future. Whether it’s smart carts with a touch screen or digital displays up and down the aisles, we can expect lots more digital signage and screens in our lives as shopping becomes more connected and digitized in the future.

And, as I say on this week’s editor podcast, I’m totally on board with more tech in the corner store as long as it includes bread-making robots filling up the aisles with the smell of fresh-baked loaves.

In addition to talking about smart grocery carts this week, we also discuss:

As always, you can check out the Food Tech Show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Soundcloud, or just click play below.

Tracxpoint’s Smart Carts Now Rolling Out at N. American Retailers

Remember back in the 90s when Hollywood kept releasing different movies about the same thing at the same time (think: Armageddon/Deep Impact in 1998).

Anyway, right now in the food tech world, everyone seems to be coming out with a smart shopping cart. In just this last month, we’ve covered Veeve, Storewide Active Intelligence (SAI) and Amazon’s Dash Cart (plus there’s Caper). Today, Tracxpoint added itself to the list by announcing its smart carts are now available for retailers in North America.

Tel-Aviv-based Tracxpoint creates a modular platform that can be retrofitted onto existing shopping carts with a combination of computer vision and a barcode scanner to automatically recognize products you put in (and take out) the cart. There is also an on-board touchscreen to display what you’re buying and navigate you around the store. Upon checkout, the shopper is automatically charged.

Tracxpoint isn’t a newcomer to the whole smart shopping cart space, however. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, European retailers, including the Conrad chain in Italy, already use Tracxpoint.

Like, well, everything today, the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating new trends in grocery retail, including contactless forms of payments to reduce human-to-human interactions. Hence so many companies rushing into the smart cart space.

Smart carts might be an easier sell for retailers looking to get into cashierless checkout because they don’t require big retrofits or buildouts of the stores themselves. Instead of installing cameras in the ceiling and sensors on the shelves, all of those capabilities can be pushed directly into the cart. And with Tracxpoint and SAI, retailers don’t even need to buy new carts. They just place the tech on their existing ones.

And while this pandemic certainly feels like Armageddon sometimes, smart cart technologies could make a deep impact in the way we grocery shop. [ed. note: Sorry]

SAI’s Smart Cart Tech Can Be Used to Check Up on Checkout Checkers

Smart shopping carts is the phrase of the week, evidently. Indeed, news stories of such carts that power cashierless checkout at grocery are popping up all over The Spoon recently. In just the past week we’ve covered Veeve and Amazon’s brand new Dash Cart, and today we add London-based Storewide Active Intelligence (SAI) to that list.

Like others in the space, SAI’s solution uses an on-board touchscreen as well as camera with computer vision software and artificial intelligence to identify products that shoppers place inside their cart, so the system can automatically charge the shopper when they exit the store. That’s nothing new; the aforementioned Veeve and Amazon do that as well as Caper.

But there are a few ways that SAI is different from the smart cart competition. First, SAI’s system fits on existing shopping carts, so stores don’t need purchase new ones. Som Sinha, Founder and CEO of SAI, told me by phone this week that stores can just swap out existing cart handles with an SAI one.

Additionally, SAI carts are outfitted with patented photovoltaics that continuously charge the cart using either sunlight or indoor lighting. This means that carts can be used round the clock and don’t need to be taken off the floor to charge.

In other ways, however, SAI carts seem to be behind the competition. SAI’s carts don’t include weight sensors, so if you want to add produce, you have to weigh it separately and print out a special sticker for the cart to recognize.

Additionally, the SAI system has only one camera with a fisheye lens, so it is possible that you could trick the system by tucking a pack of gum behind a big cereal box as you placed it in the cart. Sinha said the second-gen version of the cart will feature a second camera.

SAI, which has raised £100,000 (~$125,000 USD) and is mostly bootstrapped, won’t divulge pricing specifics for its cart, but Sinha said that the company has 450 backorders from two retailers in the UK and India. Those backorders, however are moving anytime soon as the pandemic has retailers holding off on completing those orders for the time being.

While SAI carts may not be rolling around store aisles, retailers have found another use for the technology: checking out the checkout aisles to help prevent theft. Sinha said that because the camera’s computer vision is so accurate, retailers have installed them in checkout aisles in multiple stores to ensure that everything going into a shopper’s bag is accounted for.

That seems a little Big Brother-y, but Sinha said that these catching these small infractions can translate into big dollars across all of the transactions a grocery chain does in a day.

SAI and Veeve are similar in that both are looking at employee use cases for their technology. SAI monitors checkout aisles, while Veeve plans on being used by grocery employees to fulfill online customer orders.

While the pandemic may have slowed the implementation of SAI’s carts in-stores, there is long-term opportunity for smart carts and cashierless checkout tech. Going forward, customers and retailers will be hyper aware of all the touch points inside a store, and giving customers a contactless payment option will become table stakes.

There is some debate as to which approach to cashierless checkout is better. There is the smart cart approach, or the one taken by the likes of Trigo, Grabango and Zippin, which outfits the stores themselves with cameras and AI to monitor purchases.

Sinha says that the smart cart approach is better because instead of wasting resources watching over an entire store, retailers can focus on where the actual purchasing decisions are taking place.

It’s still very early in the cashierless space and honestly, there are enough grocery stores globally that the phrase of the future will be opportunity knocking.