Smart Grocery Technologies

Portrait of a handsome worker weghing apples on the scales in the supermarket

How Using Smart Grocery Technologies Can Enhance the Shopping Experience

Technology is changing how consumers shop and how retailers operate. The grocery shopping experience is also experiencing a technological transformation. Smart technologies are streamlining operations, ensuring accuracy, and enhancing customer satisfaction. 

Grocers of all sizes are turning to innovative smart technology solutions like electronic shelf labels (ESL), advanced scale management systems, and integrated eWIC solutions to stay ahead of the competition. With these technologies in place, grocers are realizing significant efficiencies that are saving costs on labor, reducing theft, and helping them finally gain control of inventory management.

Electronic Shelf Labels (ESL)  

The challenge for grocery store operators is maintaining pricing integrity across thousands of products. Customers will get frustrated at errors caused by legacy paper label systems displaying a different price from the one charged at check out. These discrepancies cause operational problems as well which lead to inventory management issues.  

Vusion’s electronic shelf labels (ESL) offer a visually stunning and technologically sophisticated solution. Digital price tags ensure pricing accuracy across the thousands of different items grocers must stock. They also provide an additional benefit by reducing the labor involved in manually updating prices. 

Worried about the cost of a full ESL automation? Work with a company that can slowly integrate your store, department by department. Start in the most time saving areas of your store, like produce, to see the gross margin change a solution like this can make.  

The labor-intensive process of price-gunning every item in the store is replaced. Instead, pricing information is updated in real-time across the entire store. Changing prices this way eliminates the inconsistencies that often arise with paper labels. 

Electronic shelf labels further prove their value to grocery store operators by providing useful data insights such as which inventory items are selling quickly. The smart technology system can also offer suggestions on optimizing product placement to boost sales and increase revenue.

Powerful grocery technologies such as real-time reporting empower store managers to make informed decisions before bad trends turn into disasters or before it’s too late to take advantage of positive trends. Both operational efficiency and the customer’s experience are improved by the effective use of the data provided by electronic shelf labels smart technology.

Scale Management

Perishable items like produce, meat, deli, and seafood have always posed unique challenges for grocery stores. The items are a particular challenge to maintain accurate pricing and inventory control. One of the major challenges these items cause is the lack of interoperability between systems.

The traditional scale systems used in these departments often operate independently from the store’s main pricing system. This disconnect can make it easier to steal perishable items. It also leads to inaccuracies and a generalized lack of synchronization with center-store pricing.

The cutting-edge grocery technologies of Invafresh and their scale management system can help grocers overcome these problems and more. With this innovative smart technology, the same pricing and inventory control standards applied to the rest of the store are enforced on scales. This ensures consistent pricing across all departments and eliminates the headaches of older, isolated scale management systems. Connect your scales, ESL, and POS and you’ll have price changes made in real time throughout all areas of your store. 

Worried about re-wrapping items? With an integrated scale solution like Invafresh you have access to a re-wrap mode, which allows you to apply clean packaging to products without throwing off inventory counts. 

To eliminate inconsistencies, the system ensures prices can only be changed at the host level, preventing unauthorized adjustments at the scale itself. The benefits of this restriction go beyond removing opportunities for theft. It also ensures accurate back-calculation of inventory, giving store managers full control over perishables. When you eliminate theft and control inventory, profits go up.

Integrated eWIC Systems

For many grocers, income from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is a significant portion of their revenue but it can cause some operational headaches. For example, managing approved pricing and ensuring compliance with program guidelines can be a complex and costly process. 

Many stores rely on legacy, standalone eWIC machines. The problem with these systems is that it adds an extra step and additional expense to transactions. To process these transactions on the rented stand-beside equipment, items need to be scanned twice, all pricing must be meticulously maintained in separate systems. On top of all this, the hardware for the stand-alone WICs system had to be rented.

Integrated eWIC systems provide a better solution. This grocery technology solves these problems by embedding WIC transaction capabilities directly into the store’s existing point-of-sale (POS) system. Smart technology seamlessly integrates the two systems, thus eliminating the need for a separate eWIC machine, reducing costs, and simplifying the checkout process for both customers and cashiers. 

What Integrations Do You Need? 

There are many reasons your customers love your store. Embracing new grocery technology can help you improve efficiency while maintaining the charm and uniqueness of your grocery store.

Smart technology innovations like electronic shelf labels, integrated scale management system, and integrated WIC systems will not only enhance pricing accuracy and inventory control but also reduce labor costs, prevent theft, and improve overall store efficiency. 

As grocery stores continue to adopt these technologies, customers can look forward to a smoother, more reliable shopping experience that meets their needs.