A huge video wall consisting of 54 seamless monitors, interactive tables, SMART shelves, LCD touch screens screens and futuristic real-time data visualization, and even a robot that will pack your selected products. This is not science fiction, but the realization of the first mega-innovative supermarket, ” Coop in a new format, opened in Milan, Italy. Designed by Carlo Ratti Associati, the new supermarket was first presented as a prototype at the World Expo in Milan as part of the Future Food District pavilion.
This real supermarket of the future is now open to consumers in central Milan. The main goal of the project is to obtain relevant feedback from both consumers and businesses in order to develop a strategy for implementing and monetizing innovative ways of selling and communicating with store visitors. The Carlo Ratti supermarket provides shoppers with up-to-date information about food products, the origins of the most popular items, and lots of additional information about the products on the shelves. The largest representative of the food retail market presented, without exaggeration, the store of the future — a grocery store featuring cutting-edge digital technologies and Digital Signage solutions. The flagship store, covering an area of over 1,000 square meters, is generously “stuffed” with innovative technologies, radically changing the everyday perception of shopping and food consumption. The cherry on top of this installation is a huge video wall consisting of 54 seamless 49-inch monitors, where customers can view information about the store’s products, including special offers. In addition, large interactive tables display over 6,000 products, allowing customers to view up-to-date information about products, recipes for various dishes, and scroll through social media feeds. Now, let’s talk a little about innovative scenarios for interacting with consumers. When a buyer reaches for a product, additional information about the product is displayed on a suspended “digital mirror screen” located above the counter, as in augmented reality, without any additional devices or interfaces. Using digital media and advertising monitors, each product can provide information about its nutritional properties, place of origin or production, allergens, instructions for disposal after use, promotional offers, and much more useful information. This has been made possible by Microsoft Kinect innovations that use motion sensors to identify customer gestures. “Every product has its own story to tell the customer. Today, this information reaches the consumer in fragments, but in the near future, we will be able to find out everything we need to know about the apple we are looking at; about the tree on which it grew; about the CO2 it produced; about the chemical treatments it received; and about its journey to the supermarket shelf,” says Carlo Ratti, managing partner and founder of Carlo Ratti Associati and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The presentation of the interactive consumer engagement project was a success and helped the project team rethink standard approaches to developing the retail market in the grocery segment. The pilot project became the basis for collecting relevant information about consumers. Innovative approaches to communication are designed to identify more sustainable consumer habits. The first supermarket of the future offers customers a completely new level of consumer experience and provides businesses with relevant feedback. The project was the first bold step towards the implementation of innovative ideas, which will eventually be integrated into the real world and scaled across the entire network. “The next step is to open a new supermarket, which we hope will change shoppers’ stereotypes about everyday supermarket visits,” says Marco Pedroni, president of Coop Italia. У цьому супермаркеті майбутнього використовуються технології, розроблені та запатентовані компанією «Carlo Ratti Associati». It is worth adding that the flagship store was built by Inres Coop in collaboration with Accenture and Studio FM Milano. To keep the intrigue alive, we can reveal that another new store will soon open in Milan in the Bicocca Village shopping complex.
It should be noted that Innovative DMC offers a range of professional services and solutions for automating centralized audio and video content management processes in the network retail segment. You can find out more about the implementation in one of our previous articles. iDS SMART electronic price tags in the electronics retail segment.
*All photos are copyright Carlo Ratti Associati
