Supermarket chain brings cashierless to Israel

Shufersal, Israel’s largest supermarket chain, is taking a cue from Amazon Go stores in the United States and rolling out a seamless shopping experience to all of its 272 stores.

The retailer signed an agreement to install Trigo Vision’s advanced automated retail platform

chainwide. Employing artificial intelligence, Trigo Vision combines a sophisticated, ceiling-based camera network with machine vision algorithms to eliminate the need for a checkout process. The cameras identify and capture customers’ shopping items with high levels of accuracy during the in-store journey.  

“We are very excited to begin the process of development and embedding of Trigo Vision’s retail automation platform in order to offer our customers a completely seamless checkout experience," said Itzik Abercohen, CEO of Shufersal. “Customer satisfaction is one of Shufersal’s main guiding principles with technology playing a big role. We believe our cooperation with Trigo will transform the shopping experience and will minimize our customers' friction points in the stores. This venture will also drive efficiency and minimize costs across our operation. Its scalability and flexibility also means that we can roll out this technology across all of our stores, whether small express shops or larger hypermarkets.”

According to Michael Gabay, CEO and cofounder of Trigo Vision, there’s virtually no limit to the number of objects and people it can track — and it works in “medium to small” convenience stores. (Shufersal stores range from 150 square feet to 8,000 square feet.) It’s also customizable; Trigo’s partners can have shoppers enter their payment information in either apps or kiosks, both of which display running receipts that can be amended by store clerks in the event a mistake is made. Currently, the system is about 99.5% accurate, according to the company.

Using similar technology, retail behemoth Amazon has been slowly launching its Amazon Go cashierless concept in the United States, so far with five stores in Seattle and Chicago, with new locations set to open soon in San Francisco and New York. Amazon is reportedly planning to open as many as 3,000 Amazon Go locations by 2021. That would include having about 10 Amazon Go stores by the end of 2018 and expanding to approximately 50 in key metropolitan markets next year, according to a Bloomberg report.