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Discover how VusionGroup and Smartway’s integrated solution streamlines food waste management and helps ensure there are no expired products on the shelf, as well as reducing the time taken to manage expiry dates in a store’s daily operations.
Nestled between Hampstead and Camden in north-west London, Kavanagh’s in Belsize Park is a truly independent, premium food offering. The store is focused on delivering high standards of quality and fresh food offers to their customers. It also hosts the complete range of VusionGroup’s solutions including a joint offering with Smartway, a software company offering retailers an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered solution to control food waste while also improving profitability.
VusionGroup announced a partnership with Smartway in 2021, developing Smartdetection Flash Evo, a solution for detecting products with short expiry dates in stores. Out of 7,544 total SKUs in Kavanagh’s, the joint VusionGroup-Smartway solution tracks 1,423, eliminating the need to check products individually. The technology works via flashing labels, signalling soon-to-be expired products to store associates so they no longer need to spend hours in the aisle to identify and mark them down.
Smartdetection Flash Evo has been active in Kavanagh’s since 16 August 2023. VusionGroup and Smartway teams were able to evaluate the immediate benefits of the solution on the store’s productivity and sustainability:
- Increased cost-effectiveness: 78%-time reduction of which 24% thanks to Flash Evo, with 215 products saved per week.
- Improved productivity: time saving of 8.4h a week for store employees.
- Reduce carbon footprint: 1.05 tons equivalent of CO2 saved per month for one local store.
A key benefit of the solution is enabling food products nearing the end of their life to be consumed rather than discarded. As food waste accounts for 1.2 billion tonnes of food thrown away, representing 3 billion tonnes of CO2, the potential impact of implementing Smartdetection Flash Evo at scale is enormous.
VusionGroup and Smartway plan to continue working together on further streamlining waste reduction and store operations with ordering optimisation, deeper insights on reducing carbon footprint, AI-powered monitoring of fresh products, and more.
