What frustrates you most about today’s grocery store experience? Near the top for me is when I’m forced to queue to pay at the self-checkouts when the store is particularly busy. Standing behind a line of people can be frustrating, made worse when those in front struggle with scanning a product. This is particularly true for fresh produce items. Disappointingly, barcodes don’t occur naturally in the wild, so the shopper must select the item from a list. This takes additional time, can lead to mistakes and confusion (which apple was this amongst the 1,000 varieties?) and no shortage of frustration, especially if it’s me 10 shoppers back in the line watching someone struggle.
More variety, fewer interventions
Loose fresh produce is of course a recognized “good thing”. Apart from giving shoppers better access to a wide range of individual, healthier produce, it reduces the need for packaging making it greener as well. And, of course, customers want more variety, not less, which adds to the trial at the self-checkout. The list of items they select from becomes ever longer, adding to the confusion, increasing the need for staff interventions, and reducing the accuracy of the stock inventory as errors are inevitably made. As a result of the perceived complexities and interventions, research shows that more than
30% of shoppers will avoid using self-service solutions when purchasing fresh produce. Simplifying this process not only reduces the number of interventions, but also it makes self-service solutions more appealing to those who avoid it, and for the pros, they will check out that much faster.
Frustration free shopping
Fortunately, AI-based technology is coming to help. SeeChange has been incorporating its produce recognition system and working closely with Diebold Nixdorf to integrate the solution into its self-checkouts. All it needs is a standard camera mounted to the till. Then, when the shopper puts the fresh produce items on the scale, the software recognizes it and automatically adds it to the till roll. For produce sold by number – as opposed to weight – it also automatically counts the number of items the camera sees.
The whole process can significantly improve the efficiency of buying fresh produce at self-checkout:
Decreasing end-to-end item processing to just 3 seconds per item
Increasing the speed at self-checkout for fresh produce items by 67%
Increasing transactions by approx. 40% per hour
Reducing the need for store assistants to intervene by 45%
Increasing stock inventory accuracy by 100%
Accurate inventory, seamless checkout
Vynamic® Smart Vision | Fresh Product Recognition helps retailers to reduce losses from errors, whether they’re caused inadvertently or deliberately. Some retailers, for example, see a particularly high number of carrots being bought through their POS systems, significantly more than they had available to buy. Misrepresenting expensive products as cheaper ones is a common occurrence. The fresh produce recognition system helps here by automating the produce selection process and presenting shoppers with a confirmation screen for produce and quantity. This results in four times faster recognition than standard lookup options, and up to 100% improved inventory accuracy.
Best of all, shopper frustration is reduced. Scanning in fresh produce items is seamless, resulting in shorter queues and lower blood pressures all around. This is all coming to a store near you, and it’s just one of the smart vision innovations SeeChange and Diebold Nixdorf are working on to improve the experience for retailers and shoppers.
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