Experience The New Way of Shopping in Grocery Stores

Shoppers will soon find a new way of shopping, through technology-enabled grocery stores, helping them to get all the necessary food items within short time. Kroger and Microsoft’s joined venture will provide millions of customers amazing shopping experience.

Currently, the projects are pilot run at two stores operated by Kroger – one in Monroe, Ohio another one in Redmond, Washington, using Microsoft’s Azure Cloud platform and Azure Artificial intelligence, setting up a new standard in the world of technology.

The joined partnership of Kroger and Microsoft represents the future of grocery stores with EDGE shelving system. EDGE stands for Enhanced Display for Grocery Environment showing digital pricing tags, dietary facts, promotions of different grocery items.

With the help of this new application, shoppers will be able to create their shopping list in advance, before they reach the shop. Once the customer reaches the store, the sensor will navigate the customer towards the item that were selected by them previously, also notify the customer if the product is out of stock and notify the employees when there is a shortage of any product. These information are also beneficial for customers who are ordering online, helping to employees of the store to collect the selected item making the process much easier and faster.

This new EDGE Shelf will help Kroger to create new revenues by selling digital marketing space to packaged goods product used by consumers. The use of both Video analytics and artificial intelligence can help in identifying the customer features like age and sex, enabling the brand to reach their target audience. In case, the customer is in search of any particular kind of products they will receive the promotions related to that particular product.

Running of the pilot project created an increasing demand among other dominant companies like- Amazon, Walmart, Standard Cognition who have recently opened up cashierless store in San Francisco. If the project turns out to be successful over the year, then Kroger is planning for its expansion in other stores as well.