Morrisons has decided to install electronic shelf labels from VusionGroup across all its 497 supermarkets in the coming year. In total, the British retailer has ordered more than 10.8 million labels from the technology vendor. Morrisons will also use the digital shelf labels to make instore picking of online orders easier and more accurate. The retailer plans to communicate savings with its loyalty scheme More Card and offers to customers via the digital labels.
Morrisons will also integrate its shelf cameras into the rails that hold the ESLs. To analyse stock availability, Morrisons deploys cameras and software from US-based Focal Systems. With Captana, VusionGroup offers an own solution for Vision Recognition-based shelf analytics pursuing similar goals as Focal Systems.
The market for electronic shelf labels (ESLs) has been slow to develop in the UK retail sector. Although the other three big retailers in the UK – Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda – have been trialling ESLs in their stores and announcing projects for around three decades, they have not implemented them across the board. However, earlier this month, Asda announced to equip 250 of its Express stores, also with digital labels from VusionGroup, as reported by The Retail Optimiser. Market leader Tesco is currently trialing the technology with VusionGroup and Hanshow in proof-of-concepts, as reported by The Retail Optimiser.
First national UK retailer’s roll-out
“We are excited to be the first large supermarket group in the UK to introduce digital shelf edge labelling across our entire supermarket estate and look forward to rolling out the technology in 2026”, says Gordon Macpherson, Group Productivity Director of Morrisons: “This latest investment further underlines our commitment to modernising and digitising our business to deliver an enhanced shopping experience for Morrisons customers.”
The adoption of VusionGroup’s digital labelling solution is the latest initiative in Morrisons digital technology programme, with other recent developments including the roll-out of shelf-edge cameras with Focal Systems, the introduction of a digital task management platform from Yoobic and plans to test Instacart’s Caper smart cart.
