Aldi Nord

In the Netherlands, Aldi Nord will open a first store this week offering shoppers the option to scan their purchases with their smartphone or at a self-checkout. Not only the software, but also the hardware for the self-checkouts will be provided by Austrian specialist Shopreme.

Aldi Süd is continuing its rollout of self-checkouts at great speed. Each week, about 50 newly opened or renovated stores in Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain, Australia and the USA deploy an average of three of the systems each. The technology comes from Diebold Nixdorf.

For the 16th time, EHI Retail Institute this week announced the winners of the Retail Technology Awards Reta. The eight-member international jury of the award includes Retail Optimiser editors Björn Weber and Joachim Pinhammer as well as the publisher of the British trade magazine Retail Technology, Miya Knights.

Germany's largest retail organisation, Edeka Group, will optimise the orders and stocks of all its stores and distribution centres with the AI-based software platform of Relex. The decision represents a Copernican shift in the Edeka Group's IT strategy. Until now, the German retail giant has managed its inventory management systems exclusively with SAP and SAP partner solutions.

Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd are using WhatsApp for digital customer communication. Both discounters send out their leaflets every Sunday via the short message service. Unlike Rewe, they do not yet plan to completely abandon printed flyers.

Tegut will be one of the first retailers in Europe to optimise its prices, stocks, floor space and shelf placement from a unified sales forecast. To achieve this, the Fulda-based grocery store chain, which is part of Migros Zurich, will implement Relex's AI-based solution together with Competera's price optimisation tool. For SAP, the decision is a bitter blow: for more…

This week, Aldi Nord entered a partnership with Trigo to jointly develop its Vision Recognition-based store technology. The aim is to combine the technology used in Aldi Nord's first scanning-free store in Utrecht with other software to automate store processes such as the detection of out-of-stocks. The partnership was preceded by an investment by Aldi Nord in Trigo, the amount…

The market for self-checkout systems is growing by 11 percent worldwide, according to market research company RBR. Biggest growth driver is the Asia-Pacific region. NCR remains the undisputed market leader, but Chinese vendors are catching up.

Aldi Nord is testing two innovative reverse vending systems from Norwegian specialist Tomra. Its system R1 allows customers to put up to 100 PET bottles or cans into the device at once. In the checkout-free Shop & Go store in Utrecht, the discounter is testing direct transfer of the deposit amount into the Aldi app.

It is the largest POS software project in Europe to date: Lidl has once again chosen GK and will roll-out the Cloud4Retail platform of the Schöneck specialists in all 30 countries over the next few years. The largest banner operation of the European retail sector is thus enabling to operate the checkouts in the cloud and is simplifying the development…