Irish grocery retailer Kavanagh is using the integrated solution from VusionGroup and Smartway to streamline food waste management in its Belsize Park flagship store in London. Kavanagh Group operates 17 supermarkets in Ireland and the UK under the Supervalu and Budgens brands and is working with Irish food wholesaler Musgrave Group. The Kavanagh flagship store in Belsize Park in London, is the only store that operates under the ‘Kavanagh‘ name.
In the store, which focusses on freshness, the retailer uses the Smartdetection Flash Evo solution which was jointly developed by VusionGroup and Smartway back in 2021 to detect products with short expiry dates in stores. At Perifem-Day in March this year, which brings together leading French retailers and their technology partners, VusionGroup and Smartway received a Perifem Award for their joint solution.
Out of a total of 7,544 total SKUs in the Kavanagh store, the solution tracks 1,423 and eliminates the need to check products individually. The technology works by using Smartway’s date checking solution and VusionGroup’s flashing labels to indicate products that are about to expire. Using Smartway’s technology, the soon-to-be-expired products can either be discounted or donated to charity. Smartdetection Flash Evo has been in use at Kavanagh since August last year. The retailer wanted to reduce the time spent manually checking expiry dates, while maintaining exceptional standards in terms of product freshness.
VusionGroup enables locating items more efficiently
Smartway’s date checking solution together with VusionGroup’s flashing electronic shelf labels, is significantly improving Kavanagh’s operational efficiency by making the process more reliable and less time consuming. The technology enables staff to locate products more efficiently and quickly. It eliminates the need to manually search for products, enabling smoother stock management and optimising labour time.
With the help of this technology, Kavanagh reduced time spent on date checking by 78 per cent, with staff now spending just 20 minutes a day on the task, compared to 92 minutes previously. VusionGroup and Smartway’s joint solution has also had a positive impact on reducing food waste, saving 215 products a week from being thrown away.
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French retailers optimising with Smartway
Smartway’s food waste management system optimises each stage of short-dated product management. Using artificial intelligence, the solution enables retailers to identify products that are about to expire and decide on the best way to save them. Various French retailers such as Auchan, Carrefour, E.Leclerc and Intermarché use the food waste management system from Smartway.
In April 2022, Auchan Retail France rolled out the technology in all 351 hypermarkets and supermarkets with the aim of drastically reducing food waste. Within the first three months of implementation, Auchan was able to save ten million products from being thrown away. Today, every Auchan store in France is equipped with Smartway’s food waste management system, to detect soon-to-expire products directly on the shelf and repurpose them in the most optimal way.
Forecasting fresh produce
The technology provider has also developed an inventory management system for fruit and vegetables. With Smartway’s ‘Fresh Operating System’, retailers can gain real-time insight into stock levels and forecast possible future stock in the produce segment.
Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, the forecasting solution considers weather, events and seasonality. According to Smartway, the fresh operating system optimises stock levels and reduces shrinkage by 25 per cent with real-time stock insights.
Outstanding high availability with Captana
In its flagship store in Belsize Park in London, Kavanagh has been using the whole portfolio of VusionGroup’s technology since it opened end of 2022. With the camera-based real-time our-of-stock detection, Kavanagh managed to increase the average stock level of this store to 98.1 per cent on-shelf-availability. “The real time visibility is an incredible move forward that we have never had in retail before”, said Noel Kavanagh Junior, Managing Director of Kavanagh Group in a statement a few months after the opening of the store.
