Three technologies that will transform Carrefour’s shops

Technologies around checkout, picking and assortment are being developed or are about to be deployed to strengthen Carrefour’s physical stores.

At its Bourget show (93), which brought together all of Carrefour’s partners in June, Carrefour presented their technological innovations that are being developed and will be soon deployed into their stores. These innovations are based in three areas of the stores cash collection, order preparation and assortment, which aim to make life easier and more efficient for shoppers.

Data Optimised Assortment

Using data from checkouts and loyalty cards, Carrefour began in June to provide assortment recommendations to its shops, both integrated and franchised. The Analytics Factory will use the shop’s sales history and that of other brands to suggest changes according to its size and location.

Every month, Carrefour will recommend a hundred or so products that should be added as a priority or removed from the range. This solution will be of particular interest to small shops that have to make choices due to lack of space. This innovation will also suggest to each Carrefour shop which products to stock up on by forecasting consumer demand. This specific function has not yet been launched into stores because its functionality is still being tested in Carrefour bakeries, but it will soon be extended to other products.

Carrefour is also working on creating a similar innovation for customers which will suggest healthier alternatives when the customer chooses a product with a bad Nutri-score (a front of pack label that classifies foods and beverages from A to E depending on their nutritional value).

Smart PoS, the intelligent checkout

For Carrefour the smart PoS is the most important innovation project underway. The retailer wants to free itself from its service providers and replace the software of its 67,000 checkouts with a new in-house programme, called Smart PoS. This intelligent checkout will be deployed during the year in France and Spain, and it should enable a much more dynamic operation, based on real-time data.

To take an example, the intelligent checkout will be automatically applying current in store promotions as well as those linked to Carrefour loyalty cards to the total and displaying them on the customer’s screen. Another crucial innovation in these times of inflation is that prices are updated instantly, whereas previous systems could take a whole day to reflect the price changes in the store and on the customer’s receipt.

Finally with Carrefour’s intelligent checkout if a barcode is not recognised at the checkout, the cashier will be able to look on Carrefour’s national database to find the product and its price, rather than the cashier having to go and look on the shelf which will save the cashier and the customer valuable time.

U. Care, the picking ally

In Carrefour shops, it is the shop employees who prepare online orders by picking up products directly from the shelves. Now in order to facilitate their jobs, Carrefour are launching an app called U.Care.

This application shows employees the list of products they need to pick up in an optimised order. When they arrive at the product on the shelf, its electronic label will emit a light signal to help the employee find it. The application will also make it possible to declare a shortage of a product or an expired shelf life.

Eventually, Carrefour would like to turn it into an all-in-one application that would also manage employee schedules and holidays, just like the American store Walmart with their Walmart One app.