- Integration of Electronic Shelf Labels (ESLs) within WasteInsight helps improve labour productivity, saving store colleagues’ time identifying and applying discounts on near-expiry goods
- Following a successful pilot, ESL integrations within the WasteInsight solution are now live in 18 East of England Co-op stores
- East of England Co-op will roll out the solution to all its ESL-equipped food stores by September 2024
East of England Co-op has extended its partnership with Retail Insight, the leading provider of in-store execution software, for a further three years as part of its ongoing commitment to sustainability and tackling food waste.
Established over 150 years ago, East of England Co-op is now the largest independent retailer operating in the East of England. In addition to the 120 food stores it operates in the region, East of England Co-op also offers customers specialist services, such as funerals, security, travel agents and petrol filling stations, to support communities across Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire.
With sustainability a central pillar of the co-operative’s values, East of England Co-op has partnered with Retail Insight since 2021, leveraging its cloud-based WasteInsight solution to tackle food waste across its estate. Powered by cognitive technology, WasteInsight puts retailers in control of food waste through data-led, actionable insights that support the entire waste journey, including forecasting accuracy, expiration management, dynamic markdowns and donations to charities.
East of England Co-op leverages WasteInsight to drive better expiration management and smarter markdowns using the Prompted and Dynamic Markdown features within the solution. Close collaboration means that its team works with Retail Insight to implement algorithm changes to optimise the time between each markdown, reducing the burden on store associates improving labour productivity.
As part of its extended partnership, Retail Insight has integrated East of England Co-op’s electronic shelf-edge labels (ESLs) into WasteInsight to drive up labour productivity associated with produce expiration management and markdowns. The WasteInsight solution pushes alerts to store associates’ hand-held devices, notifying them of any near-expiry items that need discounting. The hand-held device then provides an option for store-associates to force the ESL for the product in question to flash, making it easier and quicker for them to identify, implement and process markdowns.
Following a successful pilot of the functionality, East of England Co-op has now rolled out the solution in 18 stores and plans to go live in all of its ESL-equipped food stores by September of this year.
Robert Hawkins, Senior Project Manager at East of England Co-op, commented: “We are thrilled to have successfully piloted the integration between our ESLs and Retail Insight’s Prompted Markdown solution. As we roll out across our estate, we are confident that we will continue to reap the rewards of streamlined processes, and we are excited to get feedback from our store colleagues.”
Kieran O’Brien, UK Client Director at Retail Insight, commented: “The work we are doing with ESL integrations across the East of England Co-op estate will ensure that we can drastically reduce the amount of time store associates spend looking for products to be marked down. The beauty of the integration is in its simplicity – because our solution works with retailers’ foundational data and is product agnostic, it can work with any ESL model and can be fully scalable across a retailer’s estate.”
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