Where raw materials come from, what packaged foods allergens are found in, how to properly dispose of a product’s packaging. Information usually written in laboriously legible font and much more (usually absent from the packaging) is within everyone’s reach at Coop Italia‘s Supermarket of the Future: a thousand square meters in Bicocca Village, Milan’s northern suburbs, where the Lombard capital’s busiest cinema is also located.
The facility repurposes the Future Food District successfully pioneered during Expo 2015. Furnished in light taupe wood, with low displays, the large sales area serves the consumer entirely. Coop is no stranger to this policy: the only large-scale retail store sign to set up a website to report the origin of branded products, it makes transparency an unrelenting workhorse. Now the breakthrough with the help of technology.
In the Supermarket of the Future, even the customer who is less accustomed to using smartphones can interact with the 100 interactive monitors distributed throughout the store and receive any information about the 6 thousand items on sale and current promotions. Along the aisles and at fresh food counters (fruits and vegetables, meat and fish), “touch totems” offer a screen on which to select products with a touch of the finger, or “read” them by passing them under the barcode reader. Through these simple moves you access the “augmented label,” that is, any information about the product you are sifting through. From the same totems one can compose a shopping list, to be picked up two hours later at the parking lot.
The implementation was led by Inres for the engineering part and Accenture for the digital part. The hi-tech innovations will also be extended to other outlets in the extensive network, which has more than 1,100 stores.