May 21, 2015

By: Rhett Asher, Vice President, Asset Protection, Data Security & Crisis Management, Food Marketing Institute 
Technology in the Aisle

E-commerce and mobile technology are changing everything, and the retail grocery business is no different. Just wait until you visit the FMI Connect expo and see all the ways you now have available to please your customers. You’ll see the true retail store of the future – both brick and mortar and virtual.

  • So you thought crowdsourcing was only for people who wanted rides – Uber – or a place to sleep – airbnb? It’s for your business too. With Instacart (Booth 1858 POD), customers can order their groceries online and then personal shoppers, using their own cars and smartphones, will shop for and deliver the groceries to them.
  • Talk about “making the bread?” With the Park City Group’s (Booth 3635) Visibility solution, one large regional retailer just increased its commercial bread sales by 7 percent and reduced its product returns by 20 percent, all by analyzing more detailed point-of-sale data than ever before.
  • Paper, plastic or reusable bag?  Shekeltronix (Booth 1556) has Grab-a-Bag technology that can decrease plastic bag consumption by as much as 40 percent, saving the retailer money and protecting the environment.
  • Want your customers to be able to order from their smartphones for in-store or home delivery, view nutritional and brand information, write reviews, add ingredients from their recipes to the cart and save shopping lists? Then check on Grid Dynamics’ (Booth 2143) Omnichannel Grocery Platform.
  • The very first product invented by an APG Cash Drawer (Booth 1756) employee was a steel cash drawer back in the early 1970s. Today, the company is still coming up with new inventions. Only now it’s creating cutting-edge products like cash recycling technologies and a new lockless cash drawer.
  • Cyber security solutions: check out CardConnect’s (Booth 2338) new technology to encode every single piece of information and store it in its own secure, irreversible token.
  • Looking to add more services that will draw shoppers to your store? How about bill-paying? Softgate Systems’ (Booth 2442) Bill Payment Centers are kiosk systems that cash-preferred customers can use to take care of their financial needs and are already in 21,000 retail locations in all 50 states.
  • Think you’ll always have cash registers where shoppers will pay for their groceries? Think again. Ever hear of Google Wallet or ApplePay? Using Near Field Communications (NFC), World Pay (Booth 2553) is moving the retail industry into the future with in-store mobile terminals.
  • Omni-channel. Multichannel. Everywhere Commerce. Whatever you want to call it, if the seamless integration of end-to-end experiences across multiple channels is the goal, Salmon Ltd.’s (Booth 1658 POD) concept of online grocery shopping is the biggest untapped opportunity in the business today.
  • Orckestra’s (Booth 1249) new e-commerce platform, Overture 3, can bring together all your product, customer, marketing and order data in a single platform…in real time… and present it to you in a single view that enables multiple customer experiences all in a single “orchestrated” channel.

With the retail technology you’ll see at FMI Connect, shopping in the future will only get easier and more convenient, both for you and your customers.