Shopic, the smart grocery cart provider, and Shufersal, Israel’s largest supermarket chain, have been announced as joint winners of the “Best AI & Robotics Application” category of the RETA awards. The announcement was made at the EuroShop conference, during a ceremony produced by the prestigious EHI Institute retail trade group and the Lebensmittel Zeitung food industry publication.
The RETA awards are allotted to retail companies that field excellent technology projects within five categories, including best customer experience, best instore solution, best enterprise solution, best connected retail solution, and best AI and robotics application. This is the second year in a row that Shopic has won an award from RETA; in 2022, the company was recognized in the “Best Instore Solution” category.
Shopic’s solution employs artificial intelligence (AI) to power computer vision algorithms that identify every item as it is placed in the grocery cart, no matter what angle it’s at, removing the need for shoppers to self-scan. Unlike other smart cart solutions, which come built in to specialty carts, Shopic offers a clip-on device that shoppers can easily attach to any standard grocery cart. This way, retailers can continue to use their existing fleet, cutting time to deployment and reducing investment in expensive infrastructure.
The screen displays cart contents and a running price total in real time, informs the shopper about relevant promotions, and enables frictionless self-service checkout. In this manner, Shopic empowers grocers to improve customer experience, to differentiate themselves from competitors with minimal risk, and to develop a new revenue channel with their own retail media offering. Shopic also provides anonymized customer data to help retail companies spot new trends, understand customer preferences, and optimize layout and inventory.
The RETA award caps a year of significant achievements for Shopic. Shufersal recently announced that it would expand its deployment of Shopic smart carts to reach at least 2,000 units by March 2023. No other smart cart provider has reported commercial-scale deployments at a comparable scale, making this a meaningful milestone for the retail tech startup.
Beyond its flourishing partnership with Shufersal, Shopic carried out new pilot deployments in major supermarket chains in North and Latin America, doubled its workforce to 80 employees, and completed a Series B funding round that raised $35 million of venture capital investments.
