Kavanagh’s, in partnership with tech firms Smartway and VusionGroup, uses flashing lights to highlight products that are about to reach their expiry date and AI to suggest ways to discount or donate them.
- More than 215 products saved from being thrown away, every week.
- 78% reduction in staff time manually checking product-expiry dates.
- Equivalent of 1.2 tonnes in CO2 reduction every month.
April 16, 2024. A central London grocery store is saving almost a thousand products from being thrown away needlessly, each month, using AI and an innovative monitoring system that reveals when products are close to their use-by dates.
Belsize Park supermarket Kavanagh’s has worked with Smartway, which helps retailers combat food waste, and VusionGroup, the global leader in digitalization solutions for physical commerce, to install Smartdetection Flash Evo, an innovative in-store short-date detection solution, designed to reduce food waste.
The system uses Smartway’s technology to list products that are about to expire. Intelligent flashing labels on shelves, created by VusionGroup, lead workers to the item. The Smartway AI then guides supermarkets on the best way to discount items to make them appealing to shoppers or facilitates donating the food to charity.
On average, the shop has avoided disposing of 215 products a week, since the system was installed, the equivalent of 1.2 tonnes of CO2 reduction per month. Smartdetection Flash Evo also boosts Kavanagh’s commitment to providing fresh, high-quality food.
Smartdetection Flash Evo can check more than 500 products in less than four minutes. So, it drastically reduces staff time trawling the aisles, manually monitoring expiry dates. Staff members used to spend 92 minutes a day checking dates, but now it’s just 20 minutes – a 78% reduction. This cuts costs and allows the Kavanagh team to focus more on other activities in the store, such as customer service.
“Our collaboration with Kavanagh’s and VusionGroup shows that reducing food waste can align seamlessly with stores maintaining quality, reducing costs and boosting profits. Cutting-edge technology like this will allow the retail sector to take huge steps forward in reducing its considerable environmental impact.”
Christophe Menez, Co-founder, Smartway
“We’ve helped create a store that is more efficient, profitable, self-learning and, most importantly, sustainable. It leverages IoT and Data technologies that can be deployed very quickly, with minimal impact on shop trading, while maximizing returns for the business and generating a better experience for consumers.”
Roy Horgan, SEVP Strategy, Marketing & Communications, VusionGroup
Press contact
Simon Hemelryk Public Relations – pr@simonhemelryk.co.uk – Tel: 07881 953614
About Smartway
Food stores throw away as much as they earn! We can no longer tolerate such waste as more and more consumers are needy. But food stores can now tackle this issue while improving their profitability. Smartway is has been a responsible firm since 2012 and was behind ‘zero waste’ shelves. The firm created the first-ever food waste management system to optimise the path of food products at the end of their lifespan. Smartway solutions use a unique form of artificial intelligence to help in-store teams detect soon-to-expire products and decide on the best way to preserve them: labelling them with a suitable discount or donating them to charities in a simplified way.
‘Let’s build a waste-free future together’
smartway.ai
About VusionGroup
VusionGroup (ex- SES-imagotag) is the global leader in digitalization solutions for commerce, serving over 350 large retailer groups around the world in Europe, Asia and North America. The Group develops technologies that create a positive impact on society by enabling sustainable and human-centered commerce.
By leveraging our IoT & Data technologies, we empower retailers to re-imagine their physical stores into efficient, intelligent, connected, and data-driven assets. We unlock higher economic performance, facilitate seamless collaboration across the value chain, enhance the shopping experience, create better jobs, cultivate healthier communities, and significantly reduce waste and carbon emissions.
VusionGroup consist of six families of solutions, harnessing the full potential of IoT, Cloud, Data, and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, at the service of the modernization of commerce: SESimagotag (ESL & Digital Shelf Systems), VusionCloud, Captana (computer vision and artificial intelligence platform), Memory (data analytics), Engage (retail media and in-store advertising), and PDidigital (logistics and industrial solutions). VusionGroup supports the United Nations’ Global Compact initiative and has received in 2023 the Platinum Sustainability Rating from EcoVadis, the world’s reference of business sustainability ratings. VusionGroup is listed in compartment A of Euronext™ Paris and member of the SBF120 Index. Ticker: VU – ISIN code: FR0010282822
www.vusion.com