august2024 - 24

cool down quickly. His company
has seen success sourcing
meals from a local provider
to use with Micromart and
generating significant revenue
that would normally be lost to
food delivery services.
Micromart
A SMART MARKET VIA
WEIGHT SENSORS
Weight sensors in smart coolers
and markets is another
option for operators. As a
co-founder of Redbox in 2002,
Mike DeLazzer knows a thing
or two about unattended retail
and scaling a company with multiple
products. Now, as a co-founder of
Instant Systems USA, which uses a
weigh-sensor approach, DeLazzer
has been distributing his smart
systems to Selecta, a European company.
" They currently have about
4,000 locations where they are using
our equipment. Here in the U.S., we
just started to deploy units as of last
year, " said DeLazzer. " These systems
are extremely accurate. "
" The one that has the most traction
is our 600 cooler, and we always
basically put them in a two-door
configuration so that you can do cold
and ambient in with the same user
interface. You can also do cold and
frozen, and we're developing a hot
hold unit, " he explained.
A SMALL-STORE SHOPPING
EXPERIENCE
Israel-based Shekel has been doing
global weight solutions for the last
50 years. Guy Moshe, the company's
chief technology officer, said Shekel
allows operators to offer a great
small-store shopping experience not
only in trust-based locations but in
more public locations with Shekel's
AI security system. " Shoppers can
take products, browse them, look in
the ingredients, return them if they
24 Automatic Merchandiser * August 2024
looking at products, either
on the diagonal or horizontally
as they go in and as
they come out of the system.
What we've done is we've
combined static cameras,
video cameras, and weight in
a way where the system has
a lot of accuracy as a result
and redundancy as opposed
to a single sensor solution. "
Kahn said that the video
A plug-and-play smart market approach can include
refrigerated, frozen and hot food products, digital price
tags and a payment solution as a package.
don't want, and with Shekel's product-aware
technology, you can see all
of that in real time, " Moshe said.
" We have our cooler that is built
all around the solution. Not only
the weight kit but also the system
integration and the screen - and
everything attached to the whole
smart cooler operation, " Moshe
explained. " We are leveraging the
raw data of our sensors to generate
a unique weight signature for every
SKU in the system. So basically, we
can differentiate between the weight
signature of very similar products
such as Coke and Fanta. "
Moshe believes the market for
smart coolers such as Shekel's, which
are currently available in the United
States, is huge. " We're seeing strong
demand, and we plan to fulfill this
with hundreds of units by the end of
this year, " he said.
COMBINING WEIGHT
SENSORS AND VIDEO
Fred Kahn, a co-founder and CEO
of Kooick, said his AI-driven smart
market system is different from the
others on the market, combining
weight sensors and video. " You have
weight only, you have video only, and
the video only tends to be cameras
that are on the door frames that are
component allows the
smart cooler to differentiate
between brands such as
Diet Coke and Coke, both
in 20-ounce bottles. It's early in the
game for Kooick, currently engaging
in pilot programs with operators,
but Kahn notes that he's working
with Due North as his cooler supplier.
He has 25 units ready to go
with an eye on selling units in the
first quarter of 2025.
SMART RETAIL
REFRIGERATION
Due North is the cooler choice for
many of the smart market developers.
" We lead the industry in integration.
It's just the nature of our business, "
said Randy Skyba, vice president of
sales and marketing at Due North.
Skyba said the performance of
smart coolers points to rapid growth.
" Many of the machines that are out
there and in the vending world,
typically a lot of consumers will
walk right by, they're not going to
buy a sandwich from that vending
machine, " Skyba said. Then you look
at a cooler and for whatever reason,
it has the persona that it is fresh, that
it is current, and I'm more willing to
look at and buy something from it.
I think it's definitely replacing vending
machines in a large way. Will it
ultimately ever replace all vending
machines? I don't know. Time will
tell on that one. " ■
august2024

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