CJ Lang is using one of its Spar stores as ‘real-life lab’ to trial industry-leading technology. The Scottish wholesaler is partnering with digital solutions company Solum to use Spar Crosshouse to advance exciting technology for the retail sector, including cameras used in a global first for the sector.
The Grocer visited the store to see what new features are available and how it’s working
Scottish wholesaler CJ Lang introduced three new systems earlier this year: stock monitoring cameras, LED strippings and electronic labels.
The industry-leading tech will allow it to modernise stores, improve the customer shopping experience and drive staff productivity.
The wholesaler picked its Spar Crosshouse store to implement the new tech, and become a ‘real-life lab’ for industry-first cameras.
LED shelf stripping
The LED stripping installed in store allows CJ Lang to improve the way customers engage with the product.
The name of the product is Newton Touch. It forms part of CJ Lang’s partnership with Korean company Solum, with which it is also trialling cameras to improve stock availability and increase efficiency in store.
The LED stripping offers suppliers the possibility to have their product on a dynamic display, different from a static digital label.
The stripping shows animated product clips – for example crisp packets, candy bars and cans being opened or moving around – side-by-side with Spar’s red strip.
“The LEDs make this part of the store much more prestigious, much more valuable, and ultimately much more sellable to suppliers”, says CJ Lang IT director Graham Murdoch.
Together with electronic labels, the LEDs make the store 100% free of paper processes, having a positive environmental impact of tonnes of paper saved every year.
Electronic shelf-edge labels
The store’s electronic shelf-edge labels come in a variety of sizes and colours, from the simple black-and-white style to labels that are part of the newest “four-colour” digital labels scheme, or imitate a blackboard look in the style of a classic greengrocer.
The store employs over 1,000 electronic labels on fresh, product, promotional aisles, dump baskets, or back-of-till for licensed products.
The labels are connected to the central system, so whenever there is a change, new label information can be sent to all 104 stores simultaneously.
This system frees staff to do other tasks: instead of printing and affixing labels, the team can spend more time on the shop floor in sales-driving activities, working on promotional stock and food to go, and upselling.
It also makes training new colleagues simpler, says CJ Lang central operations director Sonya Harper.
The labels also help reduce food waste in store, by automatically reducing product in the fresh food to go display by 50% at 7pm every night with no staff input.
“The digital screens change, the labels change, the till changes – so without any manual input, they are sold to the customer. It’s a way of managing the waste without creating an extra task for anybody,” says Murdoch. It’s automatic.”
“It’s all part of keeping food in the supply chain for longer.”
As a result, the shop sells out of baguettes almost every day with no additional tasks, she adds.
Newton Eye Cameras
Spar Crosshouse has 70 cameras installed that allow stock monitoring remotely from a central system.
The cameras monitor stock levels during the day, and create a stock report overnight for colleagues to action in the morning. They measure just two inches and are positioned on shelves opposite the product they are scanning.
“They create what’s called a realogram of the shelf,” says Murdoch. “And during the day they keep taking pictures of the shelves. Without moving, they just take shot after shot.”
Still undergoing a trial period, the results are already promising. “The on-shelf availability in store was already very high pre-trial, but the system will enable measurement and improvement,” said Harper.
Store managers are able to see from a central system what the availability is in real-time, as well as receiving reports on product positioned wrongly or misplaced on the shelves.
Newton Eye cameras can currently scan objects that are at a maximum distance of 1.5 metres and are only adaptable to certain surfaces, but are undergoing development to improve adaptability.
For this reason there are no cameras attached to walls anywhere in store, and there are spots where cameras should be monitoring that are left empty due to distance between the shelf and product.
The purpose of the real-life lab, Graham explains, is so the business can test new solutions for current limitations including space, distance, and fixtures.
“[Solum] has taken something that was perfect in a lab, in the perfect environment with no people and no complicated fixtures, and it worked,” says Harper. “What we do is part of the research and development: we are learning from real-life situations.”
Trend-setting Spar Crosshouse
The LED shelf stripping and cameras were adopted in February, making Spar Crosshouse the first globally to trial the technology in a retail environment.
Murdoch says the new systems are estimated to save staff 12 hours per week on tasks such as stock take, monitoring, and reshelfing. Spar Crosshouse is “the best Spar Scotland we have right now”, he says.
“We wanted to build a flagship store with all the different design features in it, but at the same time have the store with the best operation from a tech perspective, a place where we could experiment to enable the store reduce tasks”, said Harper.
“We are not just trialling the tech, we are trialling all the processes that sit behind it, all the maintenance at head office, the linkage, et cetera. And it’s all built on a very robust platform, which we want to roll out to all our stores”, added Murdoch.
The systems have received praise from workers too, with one Spar employee stating that “in all my 26 years’ service with this company, it is, in my opinion, the biggest game-changer to date”.
“It is not just the biggest benefit we’ve delivered to our stores in terms of tech. Our colleagues think it is the biggest game-changer to date”, adds Harper.
The wholesaler is planning to roll out LED stripping to all company-owned stores by April 2025, while the Newton Eye development will continue in partnership with Solum.
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