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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

smart cart

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.