Coop Italia, the biggest Italian supermarket chain, has worked with Accenture to revolutionise the food retailing customer experience creating the first Supermarket of the Future. Inaugurated in Milan in the Bicocca area, the new supermarket is a welcoming and innovative place which allows access to useful information on the products. It combines the tradition of local street markets with digital solutions.
TECHNOLOGY – Cooperating with Avanade (a Microsoft joint venture), Accenture has been able to help Coop enhancing its IT framework and developing the supermarket’s touchpoints. The result is a modular and flexible solution based on a Microsoft Azure cloud platform, easily scalable and replicable in many supermarkets. After the great success of EXPO 2015, where Coop presented the idea of Supermarket of the Future receiving a positive response, we kept working for our project to become reality, President of Coop Italia Marco Pedroni says.
A DIGITAL JOURNEY – This new customer experience was made possible by many digital solutions. From interactive to vertical shelves, to data viz screen. Thanks to interactive shelves, customers will be able to visualize on a monitor with a mere hand flick some additional information on a particular product, such as origin, nutritional value, possible presence of allergizing ingredients, disposal information, related products and under way promotion. Vertical shelve’s layout has been reconsidered and combined with a touch application which allows customers to find their way through different products categories, filtering them out and looking for what they want, finding out underway promotion and displaying detailed information. All this leads to a kind of “augmented labelling” which allows customers to obtain a thorough knowledge of products they are to buy. Last but not least there is the data real-time display. One of the supermarket’s walls is covered with a big screen projecting in real time content and data such as Coop brand values, special offers of the day and suggestions for food preparation, not forgetting Coop’s Facebook page posts, the list of the most sold products and promotion for each category. Coop’s Supermarket of the Future allows us to create a convergence between physical and digital world, by which customers can have a truly compelling purchasing experience, says Accenture Italia Retail Practice Managing Director Alberto Pozzi.
