Around 0.5 million tons of food are thrown away every year[1] in wholesale and retail (Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, 2015). One reason for this is that food with expired best-before dates can no longer be offered. One solution can be price differentiation based on the best-before date, for example. e-shelf-labels supports food retailers in this with the help of electronic price labeling.
For some time now, various grocery chains in the Netherlands and Spain have been testing the concept of using electronic price labels to automatically reduce prices as soon as the best-before date (BBD) approaches. This allows consumers to decide for themselves whether they want to pay the full price for long shelf life or choose a shorter shelf life with a discount of up to 60%. This principle has already proved successful with the Spanish supermarket chain: Sales there rose by around six percent, while the waste mountain was reduced by 30 percent.[2]
The idea of "dynamic price reduction" is also slowly gaining a foothold in other countries. The project can be implemented with the electronic price labels offered by e-shelf-labels under the established brands Vusion or Newton, which are available in variable sizes, in combination with various cloud solutions. E-paper based electronic price labels offer the ideal basis to integrate e-commerce in local retail. By providing W-LAN, NFC technology and smartphone apps, an omnichannel package is created that optimizes the customer experience in your store. The focus in food retail is particularly on waste reduction, process optimization and organization. In addition, electronic price signage increases overall productivity in the store. A universal cloud solution for multiple stores allows data to be available on more than one computer, so that access to the information in the cloud server can also be accessed remotely with the same flexibility. This makes dynamic price reduction easy to implement. Specifically, the best-before date of a product is stored in the central database, so that an additional (reduced) price appears shortly before the best-before date expires. The view of the two prices leads the customer to purchase the faster perishable product for a lower price.
The Vusion Rail offers another interactive display option. The VUSION Rail - V:Rail for short - is an interactive video rail with an easy-to-use display. There, prices can be flexibly adjusted via a touchscreen interface. In this way, the Vusion Rail, which runs on the basis of the VUSION Cloud IoT platform, can display falling prices at lightning speed.
E-shelf-labels helps you discover a smart solution tailored to your business.
The big goal of these electronic price adjustments is to no longer have any expired goods on the shelves and thus to generate no food waste. What was previously marked down manually can now automatically receive the optimal price discount in a timely manner.
In 2016/17, food that had exceeded its best-before date contributed significantly to waste management in the German region. That's where e-shelf-labels sees potential and that's where your company can start.
At the e-shelf-labels brand, sustainability is a matter close to our hearts. In times when environmental awareness is necessarily becoming more and more present in people's minds, we want to support you in setting a good example.
To learn more about the possibilities of electronic price labels, feel free to contact us!
[1] https://lebensmittelwertschaetzen.de/strategie/zahlen/
[2] https://www.wuv.de/tech/dieser_umweltbewusste_supermarkt_passt_seine_preise_automatisiert_an
[3] image source (unfortunately not available in english): https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1126467/umfrage/haeufig-weggeworfene-lebensmittel-mit-ueberschrittenem-mhd/, last access 11.12.2020
