Grocery retail technology helps the Colruyt Group keep it cool

Colruyt Group’s early and ongoing embrace of digital technologies has helped the European grocery chain improve its customers’ shopping experience and increase the efficiency of in-store production and logistics operations. Headquartered in Belgium, the family-owned retail corporation operates over 600 grocery stores under various brand names in Belgium, France, and Luxembourg.

Automation is critical to the company’s business goals, says Brechtel Dero, division manager at Colruyt Group, particularly in one of its largest brands, Colruyt Lowest Prices, which guarantees the lowest price for every product. “Our market promise is literally in our name, so it drives us to be innovative,” he explains. “Automation is critical for achieving our market promise while maintaining profitability.”¹

“Automating labor-intensive processes and tasks allows us to be more efficient than our competitors,” he says. “We’re investing in the most labor-intensive retail areas: distribution, supply chain, and sales. Those are the areas with the most to gain.”

For instance, as part of its commitment to providing customer-centric shopping experiences, the company’s in-house innovation team has looked for ways to improve its Collect & Go online shopping service. For more than two decades, customers have used the service to place grocery orders for pickup at a future time at their local Colruyt store. Until recently, many of the orders were collected at a local warehouse and stored in refrigerators until the customers arrived for pickup—a process that was inefficient and also left room for errors in the cold chain. To improve the efficiency of the end-to-end distribution of orders from a central warehouse to pickup points at the local stores and ensure an unbroken cold chain, the retailer developed a coolbox with passive cooling plates inside.

“With passive cooling, we needed to ensure the box stays cool and demonstrate to regulators that we have control of the cold chain,” explains Dero. “So we installed sensors in each box and connected them to an IoT [Internet of Things] platform, which measures the temperature in the box at all times and notifies us if the cold chain has been breached.”

This keeps the goods inside the boxes cool for 24 hours or more, and by eliminating the need for refrigeration, it reduces the amount of handling. More importantly, says Dero, it opens the door for long-term, at-scale grocery delivery, without the need for refrigerated trucks. Colruyt is already piloting the use of the technology for grocery delivery in some of its urban markets.

In addition, restocking aisles can be very labor-intensive for a store stocking thousands of products, particularly the process of finding the exact shelf location for specific products. Colruyt’s in-house innovation team used its existing electronic price labels, workers’ smartphones, and IoT to develop a product finder application. Workers scan an item, causing a light to flash on the electronic shelf label, letting them know exactly where to stock merchandise. The application, which is being piloted at the chain’s biggest store, saves up to 90 minutes per worker per day.

Behind the scenes, Colruyt is upgrading its existing inventory management system, which automatically tracks and manages inventory levels. The retailer is testing the use of computer vision technology within the system to provide an additional layer of inventory control. With the current system, inventory mistakes can happen if the numbers in the system are incorrect. Cameras with computer vision can detect when there’s an inventory anomaly on the shelves. “In the future, we expect computer vision to be foundational in helping the store develop a real-time digital twin of each store,” says Dero. “That way, we will know what’s happening at every moment.”

Other automation-driven operations and shopping experiences include an AI-driven checkout system that is able to visually identify groceries using image recognition instead of barcode reading, speeding up the checkout process by 20 percent; Belgium’s first cashier-less convenience store, which eliminates the traditional checkout process; and even custom self-driving vehicles that can be used to deliver groceries and transport goods to distribution centers.

“Using tech is in the DNA of our company,” says Dero. “It’s the only way to survive in a competitive retail landscape.”