EXCLUSIVE: Why Seeing Is Believing With Checkout-Free Tech
When it comes to the success of frictionless shopping at grocery stores, solutions can be looked at in different ways – literally. Tech company Grabango, for example, bases its checkout-free solutions on computer vision, compared to systems like Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology that rely on shelf sensors. Grabango recently partnered with ALDI to retrofit several stores with the technology dubbed ALDIgo and also teamed with Circle K, Chevron and 7-Eleven on deployments.
Progressive Grocer caught up with Grabango’s founder and CEO Will Glaser, who is leveraging his interest in the grocery channel and his tech background. Among other accomplishments, he is the founder of Pandora Media, which launched the first machine learning algorithm to be rolled out on a large scale in the consumer marketplace.
Progressive Grocer: Why is your checkout-free solution different and, in your opinion, a good option for today’s grocers?
Will Glaser: What we do is checkout-free shopping. The difference is that there is no line, because there is no barcode scanner. You can take something off the shelf and put it on your shopping cart or, as an alternative, you can put it in a hand-held basket, a bag you brought yourself or even your back pocket. People can get out of the store about 10 times faster, and there is no conveyor belt.
Our tech stack is different from everyone else. Amazon, a couple of major companies and a handful of other startups in this space have built essentially the same thing, which is shelf sensors that let the system know where something actually took place. None of our sensors are on the shelf and our system recognizes things by what they look like. We can understand if a can of Coke is in the Coke section or not in the Coke section, for example. All of that is easy for us.
PG: Why did you decide to get into the grocery sector?
WG: This goes back to my early adult years. My dad was a college professor and I was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. In my 20s, we got together and said, "What’s the next project?" My dad wanted a project to show he could do what couldn’t have been done before. My response was, "I don’t want to do something no one else does. I want to do something that can be done a million times over again and profitably.” That, from some lighthearted sparring with my dad, led me to start a business that made business sense.
My first love is technology. The first place I go is, "Is it technologically possible?" and then I ask, "Does it make business sense?"
If you look at us, every one of the stores we work with, whether it’s ALDI, 7-Eleven or another chain, their stores are unchanged but the merchandise changes. That makes our market about 1,000 times bigger.
PG: How did capabilities evolve for you to get to this point of computer vision systems for checkout-free shopping that benefit both shoppers and retailers?
WG: One of the many things that interested me was computer vision. In 2010, it didn’t work particularly well but I kept track of it. In 2016, it was turning the corner, and I saw that it was good enough for useful real work. Most of the world thought it was good for cars – Tesla is one company that is doing well with computer vision. I thought about what else you could do with it and I landed on grocery, again for economics.
With the economics of a grocery store, you are filling a building with merchandise people want. A computer can do it faster, cheaper and more accurately and you can lower the cost of food. For the shopper, there’s no barcode scanning, no beeping. For shoppers and (store employees) you can go back to talking to people.
PG: Grabango recently shared its findings on shrink, showing that checkout-free technology powered by computer vision reduces shrink from theft and error close to 60%. How does this speak to the future of these systems?
WG: The numbers are really strong. Shrink in a typical grocery is 2%, better in some areas and worse in others. For the worst stores, some can go out of business and that leads to food deserts.
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If the average store is 2%, ours is 0.3%. We help eliminate shrink, we reduce labor, we increase same-shopper revenue and we lift market share. We do the four things that grocers are all about, and we do it through the magic of AI.
Almost no one believed me and a few people who believed me said it wouldn’t work in their store. I said, "Then we have to open some pilot stores.” We did that in 10 stores with 7-Eleven, for example, and it was among our strongest launches ever.
PG: Do you ever go incognito into a place to see in action what you’ve created?
WG: I’m not a particularly high-profile person, but I’m an engineer and I love building things that make the world better. I love going to some of our stores and watching people check out. I won’t know them, and they won’t know me, but seeing them enjoy that experience makes me happy.
