Ever wonder how fast a NanoStore can be deployed?
Live Nation, in partnership with AiFi and Verizon, brought a portable, 5G powered NanoStore on tour to BottleRock Napa Valley in California, Sea.Hear.Now Festival in New Jersey, and The Governors Ball Music Festival in New York — all in the same month.
Alex Sophocleous, AiFi’s Head of Marketing and Strategic Planning, walks us through the NanoStore solution that allowed fans to skip the lines, purchase merch, snacks and beverages, and get back to the music faster.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Alex Sophocleous
We’re here in Governor’s Ball in New York City. We’re deploying our nano store solution in partnership with Verizon, so, fans can skip the lines, purchase merch, snacks, and beverages, and get back to the music faster. Let’s go inside and take a look. So, at this store, we have credit card entries, much better for festivals. You simply put your credit card in or tap or even use Apple Pay and the system processes it. And as soon as it adds a pre-op to your card, you remove and you can select if you want a receipt or not received to enter. And then the screen gives me a nice thumbs up and I can enter the store.
So, in this store, we have 16 cameras. And as soon as I enter the store, the cameras were able to pick up the key points on my body, so the measurements between my joints, and create a unique avatar for me. And it follows that around the store. Now, before the festival began, you have time to ingest all the products so the AI knows what all these items are and now knows who I am. And when I make an interaction, it adds it to my shopping cart. If I don’t want this size, I can easily put it back and it’s removed from my shopping cart and I can grab another item. So, let’s go ahead and make this t-shirt purchase, and we just simply walk out. It’s that simple and a receipt will be delivered within five minutes. And that’s the express shop with Verizon and AiFi.
I’m Julie Vargas. I work with Avery Dennison. I actually lead identification solutions for the food segment where we are working on taking our roots in materials, science and global manufacturing to drive on product digital identities that allow for inventory optimization and traceability across the supply chain, but ultimately expanding margins and food retail.
So one of the biggest challenges in retail in general right now is if you think about how much it’s changed in the last 10 years, there was always this idea that you could get the right assortment and have the right things in stock.
So one of the hardest things right now is not only creating that in-store experience in a way that is profitable and also, you know, focused on food, safety and assortment, but then also catering to the advent of omnichannel retail that has accelerated significantly in the past year, specifically for food and grocery.
I think one of the biggest opportunities in this space is really to look at optimizing kind of your working capital. So what do you actually have in store? And then right now, labor is short. So making sure that your staff is actually doing things that are valuable for your consumer, that requires good demand planning. It requires a lot of, you know, technical technology for infrastructure, but the root of all of that is to have a really strong dataset. What do you have? Where is it?
We’re working to not just digitize that data, but make it available in a way that can be read wirelessly automatically, you know, capturing it on a regular basis and then ensuring that there’s accuracy associated to the data sets that will ultimately drive the, the bigger, longer term interoperability of systems for retail optimization and more exciting for consumer experience.
So one of the things about any industry is there some type of inefficiency, but the food space is, is really interesting because globally we actually produce over 30% of the food that we produce for human consumption ends in a landfill. We make enough food to feed everyone on the planet, but not everyone eats.
We’re working across the food supply chain, not just in grocery, but also food service, but one of the most exciting pieces is with a large perishable brand at one of the nation’s largest food producers. So in the end perishables account for about 80% of the food waste, and that’s either food donated, lost, ending up in a landfill, but they’re only 11% of sales. And so really finding a way to optimize the right in stock amount, but then also maximizing things like dynamic pricing before expiry. Those are really core strategies to expanding margins in grocery.
In an industry that was on razor-thin margins before the pandemic and is now trying to figure out how do they build all of the infrastructure for these new consumer models and still be profitable. That is an area that’s ripe to just make sure that we use technology and the learnings of efficiencies and other verticals to drive the same type of tie between production and consumption that will help us really, both financially and environmentally.
