Monolith Group’s retail banner operation Mix Markt, which specialises in Eastern European products, has installed Mettler-Toledo’s AI-supported FreshAI article recognition system. At a location in Karlsruhe, the vision recognition solution from the weighing technology specialist is helping staff at the attended checkouts to recognise fresh items without barcodes more quickly. In an interview with The Retail Optimiser, Andrej Vedmedenko, area manager for checkout systems at the German Monolith Group, explains that FreshAI significantly reduces both the operating effort for store employees and the number of errors when recording loose items.
Monolith Group, which operates over 200 Mix Markt stores across Germany as part of a licenced operation, intends to use the product recognition system from Mettler-Toledo in other stores within this banner operation. According to the retail company, the prerequisite for this is that the test at the Mix Markt in Karlsruhe is successful. The cameras from the weighing technology specialist use image recognition in the test scenario at the Karlsruhe site to record not only fruit and vegetables and baked goods, but also the extensive range of loose sweets, which consists of more than 250 types of confectionery.
Retail companies with a particularly varied product range – such as Mix Markt in the loose confectionery segment – benefit from Mettler-Toledo’s recently launched MultiRecognition feature of its FreshAI solution. This is able to support even complex article recognition scenarios with several different products in a transparent bag. The camera solution identifies the individual confectionery mixes of its customers at Mix Markt, assigns them to the respective price categories and automatically calculates the total price, reports Andrej Vedmedenko. The IT specialist is pleased about the relief for store employees, fewer errors in price determination and more efficient processes at the attended checkout.
Seamless integration into the existing hardware and software at the checkout
“We have trained Mettler-Toledo’s system properly and are already very satisfied with the high recognition performance overall – regardless of whether products are presented to the camera loose, in bags or in nets,” explains Andrej Vedmedenko. The manager also emphasises that new store employees can be trained much faster at the checkout thanks to FreshAI, without having to know a large amount of product numbers beforehand.
Mix Markt was able to connect the hardware components required for the product recognition system with the infrastructure of the Swiss POS specialist 4POS, which is installed at its staffed checkouts – without having to make any major modifications. Equally smooth was the integration of the vision recognition solution into the POS software from Telenorma, the Baden-Württemberg-based provider. “We are also currently intensively evaluating the use of self-checkout terminals at our Mix Markt locations. The solution from Mettler-Toledo is an important building block here, so that our customers can also record loose products themselves much faster and with fewer errors,” explains Andrej Vedmedenko.
Widespread use at Albert
While Mix Markt is testing Mettler-Toledo’s system in one store, Albert, the Czech banner operation of Ahold Delhaize, is already using the AI-supported FreshAI solution at the attended checkouts in around 330 stores across the Czech Republic. The retail company has been able to significantly reduce the process of recording loose products without barcodes: Albert employees now only need an average of 3.7 seconds per item instead of 8.4 seconds, a retail manager told The Retail Optimiser.
