Björn Weber

The world's first Amazon Fresh supermarket has opened: A short tour provides insights into Amazon's food strategy.

Kaufland is introducing self-scanning with customers' smartphones in its shops in the Czech Republic. Software partners are the Dutch specialists of Re-Vision.

At Woolworths Australia, Tiliter's self-scanning scale automatically indentifies produce. This also interests European grocery retail companies.

Groupe Casino's Cdiscount is starting another test run with the new generation of smart returnable packaging from LivingPackets.

At the first inner city store of its Combi format, Bünting sells 500 articles fully automatically around the clock. This is the first use of the automatic store, which Wanzl and the Knapp subsidiary KHT presented at this year's EuroShop in Düsseldorf.

With Edeka's Netto, another German discounter is testing self-scanning with customers' smartphones. The team of IT Managing Director Claus Leitl deliberately relies on a proprietary development that is fully integrated into Netto's customer app.

In Portugal, Auchan has started a project with Trax using robots to report out-of-stocks, incorrect price labels or placement of items. Will the use of such robots, which is already widespread in the USA, also be successful across Europe?

Zebra wants to take over Reflexis for around 500 million euros. The plan shows the pressure on retail technology providers to do more business with software instead of hardware.

Walmart reacts to the pressure from Amazon: Also in Canada, the world’s largest retailer starts a multi-billion investment, predominately into technology. Two new distribution centres will be automated: One by Witron and one by Vanderlande. In its stores, Walmart aims for innovative inventory management, additional product information and innovative checkout processes -- partly based on computer vision.

Aldi Süd is launching a worldwide call for tenders to find start-ups in the fields of machine learning and computer vision that could help the discounter to automate stocktaking and scanning.