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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

supermarket

Grocery Stores Get Scrubbing with Extreme Sanitizing Measures

My wife commented yesterday that in all our years of marriage, our fridge and pantries have never been this stocked. Dry goods, frozen foods and pasta sauces? Check, check and check.

But even with that (hopefully sufficient) amount of preparedness, there are still perishable food items that we go through pretty quickly. Milk, fruit, yogurt, etc. So we are still making trips to the local grocery store. On one such trip this week, we saw how our supermarket is going to new, extreme lengths to stay clean and reassure nervous shoppers that it’s okay to go in.

First, all the shopping carts are being sanitized. You can’t even bring the cart back into the store yourself. They stay outside, where employees then take them and give them a thorough wiping down before bringing them back into the store. The same wipe downs happen with the credit card machines after each use.

These same types of sanitation protocols are going at other retailers. We at The Spoon have seen it at our local Costco and PCC Market, and The Island Pacific Supermarket chain in California sent us a press release this morning announcing all of the new sanitation procedures it has put into place.

Like so many new behaviors this pandemic is creating, I wonder if these safety measures will just become the new norm. If you take two seconds to think about it, it’s kind of crazy that we all use the same checkout touchscreen without some kind of wipe down in between. The supermarket is the place sick people go to buy medicine! After this subsides, how many of us will carry around Clorox wipes in our pocket to give touchscreens or ATMs and shopping carts a quick once over?

There isn’t a lot of good to be found with this outbreak, but better hygiene procedures for the public places we frequent might just be one of them.

Are You Ready for the Surveillance Supermarket?

Next time you visit the grocery store you may want to smile. That’s because cameras may not just be watching you to deter theft, they may be checking to see how happy you are (and how old you are, and what your gender and ethnicity are, etc). Welcome to the new surveillance supermarket, where you provide private companies with reams of actionable data while you shop.

An Associated Press report yesterday outlines a new wave of companies looking to install cameras in coolers and shelves in supermarkets. These cameras work to guess attributes like your age, gender and emotional state to show you hyper-targeted ads in real-time. The AP story mentions startups like Mood Media and Cooler Screens as companies creating this all-seeing technology, and says retailers like Kroger and Walgreens are experimenting with them in different locations across the country.

We just covered a startup called AWM Smart Shelf this week, which recently raised $10 million and uses a combination of cameras, AI and digital displays to serve up real-time ads and product recommendations, and even guide you through the store to find what the product you want. On its website, AWM touts its ability to identify ethnicity, age and emotional state.

The idea behind these companies is that these deep visuals can give retailers deep insight into their customers. Knowing what, when and where people purchase items tied to demographic information can arm stores with data used to serve up specials that entice them to buy more.

But it’s not just about building a better advertising mousetrap. There are a host of startups looking to retrofit supermarkets with hundreds of ceiling-mounted cameras to facilitate cashierless checkout (à la Amazon Go). These cameras keep track in real time of where you go in the store, what you pick up (and put back) and create a frictionless shopping experience.

Just yesterday, Walmart unveiled its Intelligent Retail Lab store, which uses banks of cameras and AI to monitor shelf inventory. Walmart said the cameras don’t currently track shopper movements or employ facial recognition, but it’s hard to believe a giant retailer like Walmart would stop at just making sure shelves were properly stocked. It, like Amazon is on a constant quest for efficiency, and understanding the behavior of its customers goes a long way towards streamlining operations.

All of these installations bring up serious questions about what kind of data is stored, how it’s being used, who has access to it, how long it’s stored and how it’s protected. It’s nice if some algorithm suggests milk to me on an in-store screen when I buy my Weetabix, but will that same algorithm unknowingly try to put booze in front of a depressed alcoholic in recovery? Or will it discriminate and serve up different prices based on skin color? What if your store’s data is connected to your insurance and the two prevent you from buying ice cream? These are questions retailers are going to have to answer (and we’ll be asking them!)

While privacy alarm bells should be ringing, part of me wonders how much people will care given the constant state of surveillance we’re already under. Will this just be one more tradeoff we make for convenience?

I myself am partly to blame. I love shopping at Amazon Go because it’s so easy. I’m a little less enthused about real-time ads, but that’s mostly because I think a store filled with constantly flashing digital signage would give me a headache. But in the meantime, I’m happy to tell Safeway what I’m buying when I punch in my loyalty card number to save a couple bucks.

Cameras in your grocery store are coming, are you smiling about it?

Kroger Gives Tech Initiative IoT Spin As Amazon Turns Up The Heat

Back in 2014, grocery store giant Kroger began to discuss its digital shelf technology, where they would replace traditional shelf labels with digital shelf labels to enable features such as dynamic pricing. Over time, this effort would expand to include personalized information for the shopper.

By late 2015, the digital shelf tech had rolled out from a few dozen stores to over two thousand nationwide and had begun to incorporate dynamic pricing and nutrition info.

Now the company is looking to power-up its digital shelf technology with IoT. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Kroger “is testing sensors and analytics technology to let shelves and products interact with shoppers walking the grocery aisles.” The new system would be able to detect individual shoppers and created targeted advertising using the electronic shelf display screens.

This new effort, which looks to employ location-sensing and authentication technology that at least sounds similar to what Amazon is talking about with Amazon Go, is currently in 14 stores in the company’s home market of Cincinnati.

Can grocery giants like Kroger employ IoT tech to make the shopping experience better? They better hope so. After all, it’s not like Amazon is slowing down its grocery ambitions. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that Amazon has plans that go beyond the smaller concept store unveiled in Seattle in late 2016.

As Allen Weiner wrote about the effort earlier this week, “Amazon will test two other concepts, including a drive-through version and a larger, expansive store to compete with Target and Wal Mart. Based on its tests, Amazon will move quickly into expansion mode with a full-scale, nationwide rollout. The initial batch of such IoT grocery stores will likely be based in states where Amazon has large fulfillment and warehouse centers.” The Journal reports Amazon could open up to 2,000 such stores under the planned rollout.

For grocery store companies, this move towards context-aware and IoT-powered shopping is nothing new. What is new is Amazon taking things next-level with Amazon Go, which uses IoT and AI to go beyond incremental changes and entirely rethink how grocery shopping should work.

And now, slowly but surely, established players like Kroger are trying to figure out what it means when the leading online retailer moves into their world of brick and mortar.