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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Walmart, Tesco, and Other Food Brands Join the Consumer Goods Forum’s Food Waste Coalition

As the world’s food waste issue becomes more urgent, food companies up and down the supply chain are under pressure to deliver solutions that address the problem and help consumers change their behaviors in their grocery stores and homes. One such effort that surfaced this week is the Consumer Goods Forum’s Food Waste Coalition, which has a goal of “halving per capita global food loss at the retailer and consumer levels,” according to an announcement from CGF.

The Coalition, as it’s being called, includes 14 initial members, many of them major food retailers, including Walmart, Ahold Delhaize, Sainsbury, and Tesco. (See the full list of companies below.)

Through their participation in the Coalition, these companies are currently addressing three commitments:

  • To measure and report food loss data by 2021
  • To help scale up Champions 12.3’s “10x20x30” initiative, which supports UN SDG 12.3 that aims to halve global food waste by 2030
  • To address post-harvest food waste and develop new strategies to curb it

Worldwide, the food waste problem has been steadily gaining attention over the last couple years in the form of food producers and tech startups bringing potential solutions to market. There’s a good reason for this uptick in activity: Roughly 1.3 billon tons of food is wasted globally each year, totaling about $990 billion in economic losses. There are also profoundly disturbing environmental and human costs to food waste: food waste’s global carbon footprint is estimated to be 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases. That’s to say nothing of food insecurity. In the U.S. alone, rescuing even 15 percent of the food we waste could feed 25 million Americans. In developed countries, the majority of food waste happens at the consumer levels, in retail or in the home.

The new Coalition is a pick of international companies that will also create regional groups to drive change at a local level. “Given the magnitude of the problem of food waste, CGF members are committed to reducing food loss in their own supply chains,” the Coalition states on its website.

The full list of initial companies includes Ahold Delhaize, Barilla, Bel Group, General Mills, Kellogg Company, Majid Al Futtaim, McCain Foods, Merck Animal Health, Metro AG, Migros Ticaret, Nestlé, Sainsbury, Tesco, and Walmart.

This isn’t CGF’s first foray into the food waste category. It has worked in the past with Champions 12.3, publishing a report in 2017 about the potential return on investment from food waste and calling for more standardized date labels on food items.

The Coalition hasn’t yet named any specific strategies around how it will tackle the food waste problem.

The good news is that there are an increasing number of innovative options for the Coalition to choose from as there are many startups are tackling food waste throughout the supply chain. Apeel’s produce-coating technology helps extend the shelf life of produce. AI-based technology like that of Afresh helps stores better manage fresh inventory, so less goes to waste. And food rescue apps like Karma help keep extra food from restaurants out of landfills.

Hopefully, this new Coalition can use some of its resources to join that effort and develop new solutions and processes that get people to not just think about but also act on their behaviors around food waste. 

It’s Official, Tesco is Using — and Investing in — Trigo’s Cashierless Checkout Tech

Earlier this summer we heard rumblings that UK-based grocer Tesco was working with Trigo on cashierless checkout stores. Those rumblings have now been confirmed: Trigo informed The Spoon this morning that the two companies have announced a partnership that also includes an equity investment by Tesco in Trigo.

The exact amount Tesco invested was not disclosed, but it follows a recent $22 million Series A round raised by Trigo last month. Trigo’s total amount of publicly disclosed funding is $29 million.

Trigo retrofits stores with cameras, computer vision and AI software to create cashierless checkout retail experiences. Consumers enter a store, grab what they want and leave with the payment automatically processed.

This is the second retail partnership for Trigo, following one with Israel-based supermarket chain Shufersal last year. According to a Trigo company spokesperson, the startup has been working with Tesco for more than a year.

Details of the partnership were scarce, but the fact that Tesco publicly name-checked Trigo is another example of how cashierless grocery checkout is maturing. Retailers are no longer privately testing out these systems, but instead making announcements about them. Giant Eagle is working with Grabango and Brazil’s Lojas Americanas has partnered with Zippin. Worth noting as well is that both Trigo and Zippin have received strategic investments from retail partners, a sign that Lojas Americanas and Tesco are serious about implementing, or at least more deeply exploring, cashierless checkout.

Today’s news also comes during the same week that we learned Amazon is going ahead with leases for its own grocery store chains. The e-commerce giant reportedly has plans to open dozens of grocery store locations in addition to its existing Whole Foods stores. What we don’t know yet is whether Amazon will be using the same cashierless checkout technology it uses in its Amazon Go stores at these new grocery outlets.

With 6,800 locations, Tesco represents a potentially big outlet (and payday) for Trigo. Today’s partnership does, however, come one day after Tesco’s CEO abruptly left the company. Will the new CEO feel the same way about cashierless checkout? Momentum for this friction-free shopping seems to be gaining, so the trick now will be to see how consumers — and retailers — take to the idea.

With Reported Tesco Partnership, is Trigo Vision Pulling Ahead of the Cashierless Checkout Pack?

Tesco, the U.K.’s largest grocery store chain, is reportedly testing out cashierless checkout using technology from Israeli startup, Trigo Vision. Bloomberg was first to report the as-yet-not-confirmed news, and framed its story as Tesco going up against Amazon and its Go stores. Which is accurate, but I think the bigger story, again if true, is about Trigo Vision gaining traction in the market.

Similar to the setup at Amazon Go stores, Tel-Aviv-based Trigo Vision installs high-tech cameras and artificial intelligence in existing grocery stores to automatically track what people purchase. Shoppers scan an app on their phone upon walking in, grab what they want and leave, getting charged automatically upon exit. Last August, Trigo Vision told The Spoon it had a pilot program with an unnamed European store, and was aiming to to open a full store in Europe by August of this year. Knowing that, word about a quiet partnership with Tesco getting leaked to the press now would make sense.

If the Bloomberg story is true, this would be the second major grocery chain partnership for Trigo Vision. In November of last year, Shufersal, Israel’s largest grocery chain, announced it would be rolling out Trigo Vision’s tech to its 272 store locations over this year. You can actually see Trigo Vision in action at a Shufersal in this video from an Israeli news broadcast:

As we’ve covered before, there are a raft of startups all vying to help supermarkets move to cashierless checkout. But Trigo Vision is the only one to have named at least one partner publicly. Others, such as Grabango, Caper, AWM Smart Shelf, Zippin and Standard Cognition are all in tests with retailers, but those retailers are still unnamed.

Again, the Bloomberg story still needs to be confirmed (we’ve reached out to Trigo Vision for comment), but perception can play a big part in vendor selection. As Trung Nguyen, VP of eCommerce for Albertsons explained at our recent Articulate food automation summit, grocery retailers aren’t just looking for cool new tech; they need a solution that can work at scale. If Trigo Vision’s name keeps coming up in headlines as a proven technology partner, then Trigo Vision will become the perceived leader of the cashierless checkout pack. This perception can then lead to more deals and that dominance can perpetuate itself.

Now, it’s still very early days in the cashierless checkout space, and Trigo Vision’s long-term success over other vendors is far from guaranteed. As noted, there are a lot of players with different takes on the tech and there are a lot of grocery stores in the world. And while Amazon and Walmart are developing their own cashierless checkout solutions, the sheer scale of their overall businesses could be a threat to the very existence of other retailers.

Tesco, it seems though, is ready to put up a fight.

Embracing Chaos: How Some Are Turning To Tech To Reinvent The Supermarket

The grocery store landscape is changing fast. Retail food palaces are simultaneously going big, small, mobile and even virtual to please millennial consumers who want it now, want it digital and want it delivered. At the same time, this rapidly growing audience wants it fresh and healthy. Add in technology, which has become a weapon for giant grocery chains, start-ups and food-tech visionaries who see such tools as AI, virtual reality, predictive algorithms and mobile apps as paths to new models of buying food, and the result is a market hurtling towards chaos.

One person embracing the chaos is Tomas Mazetti. Mazetti is the person behind Moby, a grocery store of the future concept that the Swedish inventor/activist created in partnership with China’s Hefei University.

One crucial part of this project is Himalayafy, a spinoff of Mazetti’s bicycle-powered coffee cart business Wheelys.  Himalayafy is the brains and infrastructure for the Moby store—an autonomous, staff less store that is open 24 hours a day. Portable and self-contained, the future for the concept is to economically offer fresh groceries to people who live in remote and rural areas where a large-scale retail supermarket is difficult to sustain. One Moby store can handle a number of underserved areas because it can easily move from one location to another.

“The biggest costs to have a store are the place itself to rent in a central city–it’s ultra-expensive–and the staff is really expensive, and we’re removing both of these at the same time,” Mazetti told Fast Company.

When customers enter the Moby structure, they are met by an AI-powered hologram with purchases scanned and track during the shopping process. Much like Amazon’s proposed grocery store experiment, shoppers need not wait in a checkout line at the end of the process.

247 STORE WHEELYS

Software and AI power Moby to manage its inventory and drive to a local warehouse for restocking when needed. In an area with more than one Moby, the stores can replenish one another when products run out. The delivery process for sharing goods could be handled by drones.

“It’s common in stores that one store has run out of milk, another has run out of eggs, but both of them need to have a truck go back and forth to a warehouse,” added Mazetti. “We can ship these products in between, so we don’t need to go back and forth these long distances to rural areas to do this.”

As one of the global hotspots for mobile payments, Shanghai was chosen for the beta test of Moby. That location also is prime because it’s the site of the manufacturing facility that builds Wheelys coffee carts. One issue to overcome is the restriction of fully autonomous cars on Chinese roads. Mazetti hopes to roll out Moby stores on a large scale in 2018 with many of the purchases made by communities where residents band together to purchase this grocery store of the future.

It’s not just upstarts like Matettiz who are using tech to reimagine the supermarket.

Tesco, the giant British grocery chain, took its retailing expertise, knowledge of the South Korean market and emerging digital prowess and built its virtual supermarket in 2011 at a popular subway station. After downloading the Homeplus app, users can scan the CR codes on strategically placed posters that resemble the aisles of a grocery store. Orders are generally delivered the same day.

Just four years later, there were 22 Homeplus virtual stores in South Korea, and today the brand is the country’s No. 1 online retailer.