The robots coming to an aisle near you

Join the AACS Study Tour to the USA in October to see the latest convenience store technology

It’s not a scene from the Jetsons; some innovations are coming to a supermarket near you, and probably sooner than you think.

Sue Mitchell
July 13, 2019
AFR

A woman walks into a supermarket and picks a meal kit – perhaps lamb shanks with roast potato or teriyaki beef with rice – off the shelf.

An electronic shelf label tells her not only the price but the provenance – where the lamb or beef came from, whether it’s grass-fed or organic – when it was made and how many calories it contains.

Woolworths’ safety robot, nicknamed Greggles, alerts staff to trip and spill hazards but doesn’t clean up the mess himself – yet.  Supplied

If the meal kit is close to its use-by date, the price on the electronic ticket might be a few dollars lower than it was earlier in the week, having been automatically updated by store staff.

The woman drops the meal kit as she scrambles to scan it with her smart phone to skip the checkout queue, but within seconds a robot scoots over to clean up the mess.

It’s not a scene from The Jetsons; it’s coming to a supermarket near you, and probably sooner than you think.

Robots, digital technology and artificial intelligence are infiltrating Australian supermarkets as retailers try to cut costs and respond to fast-changing consumer shopping habits as competition grows from disrupters such as UberEats, Deliveroo, HelloFresh and Marley Spoon.

Online grocery sales are rising between 20 per cent and 30 per cent a year, but 97 per cent of food and grocery shopping is still done in bricks-and-mortar shops and retailers are starting to invest heavily in these to keep up with technological change.

This is on top of billion-dollar investments in online trading and automated warehouses and fulfilment centres.

In the past few months Coles and Woolworths have introduced several technologies – such as touch screens with cameras to reduce theft at automated checkouts, cash- and card-free shopping and hand-mounted devices to guide staff around stores as they refill shelves.

More changes are on the way as the big chains engage in a retail technology arms race ahead of the arrival of German retailer Kaufland and the inevitable launch of Amazon Fresh.

Hand-mounted devices help guide Coles staff around stores to restock shelves. Supplied

On Tuesday, Coles announced a long-term partnership with global technology leader Microsoft. It says this will transform the customer shopping experience by using artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to tailor ranges, deliver more personalised choices and slash costs by using technology to replace manual tasks.

While Coles is keeping its customer-facing plans close to its chest, the retailer is looking at innovations such as electronic shelf-edge tickets to simplify the massive task of marking down specials on 4000 items across 800 stores every week. “You don’t have to have someone wandering the aisles and changing them manually,” a Coles spokesman said.

Meanwhile, Woolworths is expanding a trial of its “scan and go” technology, which allows customers to scan products with their smartphones as they shop and pay through an app linked to their credit cards.

It saves customers time and enables them to tally their grocery bill as they shop.

After launching the trial at its Double Bay store in Sydney last September, Woolworths recently extended the trial to four metro stores in the Sydney CBD and a full-service supermarket on Sydney’s northern beaches.

Woolworths’ Scan&Go app allows customers to scan products as they shop and pay without going through a checkout.  Supplied

Woolworths says thousands of customers have tried the scan-and-go app, more than two-thirds have reused it and feedback from customers and staff is positive.

More than a million people in the past year have also downloaded the Woolworths shopping app, which helps customers navigate stores more easily and allows them to shop weekly catalogue and personalised specials on their mobile devices and to build shopping lists for pick up, delivery or in-store shopping.

At a new store in Gregory Hills in Sydney’s west, Woolworths is testing a safety robot nicknamed Greggles, which roams the store and scans floors for trip and slip hazards.

Greggles alerts staff to the hazards and doesn’t do the cleaning itself, but retailers overseas are developing robots with cleaning capabilities.

A Woolworths spokesman says despite encouraging early results, there are no plans to roll out safety robots to other stores. But the familiar refrain “mop and bucket to aisle nine” could one day be a thing of the past.

Australian retailers are also starting to use image recognition and artificial intelligence to solve age-old retail problems such as items being out of stock, a problem estimated by IHL Group to cost retailers globally more than $1 trillion in lost sales a year.

Trax is digitising bricks and mortar stores by using image recognition technology and AI to monitor and analyse products on supermarket shelves.  Supplied

One Australian supermarket is doing a pilot with Israel and Singapore-based tech company Trax Retail, while another is testing technology developed by the Lakeba group. Their technologies differ slightly but both use cameras (Lakeba’s original version used drones instead of fixed cameras) and AI to monitor stock on the shelves and alert retailers (and in Trax’s case suppliers) when products need to be replenished.

Lakeba is supplying its real-time inventory management technology, developed in Australia,  to some of the world’s top-10 food retailers in markets including the United States, United Kingdom, Central America, Europe and the United Arab Emirates.

Lakeba founder and chief executive Giuseppe Porcelli says Australian retailers were initially sceptical about the benefits and returns of using AI and digital technology to automate replenishment, but take-up is now on par with that of leading retailers overseas.

“They’re more confident and they understand that Amazon is coming,” said Mr Porcelli. “They have to become very competitive from a technology perspective.”