Kavanagh’s • Belsize Park • London
How did Kavanagh’s achieve to transform its anti-waste processes to reduce shrinkage managing time by 78%?
Store surface area : City centre supermarket
Solutions : Smartdetectiont
God save the queen… and the anti-waste!
The Kavanagh’s supermarket of Belsize Park was at a turning point, and it is technology that answered its challenges. With a reputation built on the freshness of its products as a “freshfood specialist”, the chain had to maintain irreproachable quality on the shelves, while juggling the time spent on product control and dealing with a turnover problem. Both product, human and economic issues, since the extent of what was thrown away was a potential source of profit to exploit.
Smartway and VusionGroup understood these challenges, equipping the store with smart labels to facilitate anti-waste management on the shelves, a combination of their know-how. Smartdetection FlashEvo is the technology that is changing the way our Anglo-Saxon neighbors deal with food waste.
Reportage.
Offer products
with an excellent freshness quality
Reduce time spent
on checking dates
Reduce the store’s food waste
and carbon footprint
Simplify employees’
morning routines
The challenge Kavanagh’s is facing: use technology to transform its business processes to combat food waste
Kavanagh’s Belsize Park is an upmarket supermarket in the heart of London. It has loyals, high-volume customers, who come here every day to shop. The store’s emphasis is on fresh produce and dishes prepared on the premises. With VusionGroup, the store already benefits from a portfolio of applications to improve its daily operations.
But when it comes to food waste, the stakes are high:
- Daily loss of time due to manual date checking
- Need to offer exceptional quality in terms of freshness
- Need to reduce food shrinkage
Currently, the major challenge lies in the employees’ lack of familiarity with the key gestures regarding the anti waste processes. The obvious response is to introduce a technology that guides employees through good practices and processes in a precise order. This approach, based on the digitalization of the anti-waste gesture, represents one of the most effective and quickest solutions for a food distributor to implement.
A store shouldn’t pay to reduce its waste. On the contrary, it should try to recycle as much of its end-of-life products as possible.
An anti-waste philosophy rapidly integrated internally at Kavanagh’s thanks to the technology
At the Kavanagh’s store, anti waste practices were not sufficiently rooted in the corporate culture. Historically handled manually, this subject was not really taken into account. Every morning, the teams carry out the date control, checking all the products on the shelves. A long and tedious task for self-service employees, and a source of errors. The result? Inevitable loss of sales, with products too close to their sell-by date or even past it, and therefore irretrievably discarded.
This is where the Smartway solution really comes as the perfect asset: to avoid unnecessary waste by identifying short-dated products at the right time and promoting them. And to do so, the first step is to make employees’ work easier.
Another threat, once the anti-waste gestures have been integrated, is the loss of information caused by high employee turnover. This forces management to re-train new staff to ensure that the right gestures remain permanently acquired in the store. A perpetual investment, a source of useless energy and wasted time.
Smartdetection FlashEvo, a combined solution from Smartway and VusionGroup, facilitates the location of short-dated products, and thus the learning for new employees.
Simplify the tracking of short-dated products with smart labels
Smartdetection FlashEvo has a simple objective: simplify as possible the work of self-service employees when it comes to the management of short-dated products. The idea behind this unique product is to combine software intelligence with technology designed for the retail sector. On the one hand, a Smartway short-date GPS informs employees on the shelves which products need to be checked. On the other, a light signal positioned on an intelligent price label, a VusionGroup solution, to help find these products.
The results of this partnership:
- Daily time savings for employees
- Guaranteed freshness for customers
- Shrinkage turned into profits
A new era for Kavanagh’s.
“The customers feedbacks we have since we set up the system are fantastic.“
Noel Kavanagh Jr.
Managing Director, Kavanagh Group
A reinvented routine for self-service employees
Without the anti waste digitalization, the date checking of expiring products at Kavanagh’s was long and tedious for the teams in the shelves. A manual check carried out on a daily basis was of no interest to the teams, depriving them of time for other tasks on the shelves and a source of errors, penalizing the store’s overall image. With the Smartdetection FlashEvo solution, the time spent checking product dates is reduced by 78%. An incredible time-saver for optimizing shelf facing and carrying out other customer satisfaction projects within the store. This reinvented anti waste process is also a source of motivation for teams, satisfied to commit themselves to a meaningful project.
The freshness guarantee, at the heart of the anti waste fight
Kavanagh’s has built its supermarket offer around fresh produce prepared daily on site. The level of freshness expected by customers is therefore very high. And to meet their demands, the store has to offer products with ideal use-by dates, maximum flavor and nutritional value.
But it must also guarantee optimum product preservation on the shelf, for displays that trigger purchases.
The anti waste battle is therefore essential to show to the London consumers an exceptional level of freshness.
“The solution is very impressive. I recommend it to all other distributors.”
Noel Kavanagh Jnr.Orhant, Managing Director, Kavanagh Group
The results:
20 min of date-checking
everyday (vs 92 min initially)
215 saved products
from the bin/week
78 % time reduction
on date-checking
1,05 tons equivalent of CO2
saved/month