Fresh food monitoring is an AI-powered real-time digital monitoring technology that determines the shelf-life of fresh fruits and vegetables in the retail industry. The system behind fresh food monitoring analyzes the live feed from regular IP cameras to instantly monitor the freshness of fruits and vegetables. The benefit of the technology for the retailers is to prevent food waste as well as financial losses while easing the retail operations. Coginitiwe’s smart solution for the shelf-life management of fresh foods perceives out of favor foods before they become waste as it is always trained to deliver freshness.
According to a Deloitte report, the fresh food category is getting more critical and valuable than ever for retailers. However, even though it is vital for retailers to keep the fruits and vegetables fresh, retailers want to present fresh foods to increase customer satisfaction; sometimes, the conditions do not always allow it. That is why the grocers should use AI technology to keep their fruits and vegetables fresh.
Why is AI monitoring important for retailers?
As a consequence of accelerated digital transformation, AI technologies take over traditional methods in every walk of life. Early adopters of this emerging technology are already stepping ahead of the digital transformation. However, why should retailers prefer an intelligent fresh food monitoring system and start reaping the greatest benefits of it? Here are the five most important reasons to implement AI-based fresh food monitoring:
- Make Your Customers Happy: Customers’ patronage of supermarkets and retailers is a prominent factor in purchasing a good quality product. The service that customers are encountered in fresh food sections has a positive influence on their holistic perception of quality at the store. Taking advantage of the fresh food monitoring technology attracts customers since the shopping experience is enhanced with fruitful benefits. The level of satisfaction with a product, service, or experience is intimately linked with consumers’ happiness which also encourages new customers to have this unique experience as well.
- Reduce Food Waste: Food waste is a significant economic and environmental problem in the contemporary world. The trackability of food waste is also vital for the retailers to control the financial loss. Businesses have the opportunity to monitor and reduce fresh food loss by implementing technological solutions like artificial intelligence-based fresh food monitoring.
- Extend Shelf Life: Real-time monitoring through IP cameras to check the condition of fresh fruits and vegetables enables you to control their shelf lives. AI technology gives you a chance to determine the condition of the fresh food on the shelf before it loses its quality. Keeping the fruits and vegetables fresh in the store is essential to reduce food and financial losses and increase customer satisfaction.
- Easy Implementation: Besides all the benefits of Smart Stock, easy implementation of the system is a tremendous advantage for the retailers. Fresh Food Monitoring technology uses regular IP cameras to monitor the food. Therefore, supermarkets and retailers do not need to invest in a new camera system for smart stock.
- Increase Profits: Financial costs of food waste in the retail industry are more than predicted. Using digital monitoring means you will waste less food and increase your annual profit compared to the traditional manual inspection method.
How to monitor the Freshness of Vegetables and Fruits effectively?
How much does food waste cost your company? Do your customers complain about fruits they bought covered with molds the next day? A significant amount of food is thrown out every day as it spoils before it is supposed to for many reasons. From the larger to the smaller scale, almost all grocery stores desire to control the freshness of vegetables and fruits for specific reasons. Many researchers and corporate companies worldwide are on duty to figure out a way to keep the diverse range of food fresh while reducing the amount that ends up pulped on the other end of their storage or even on the shelves. “Traditional methods” may be perceived as effortless and accustomed methods, but in reality, being hardwired costs you more. Therefore, counting on an “artificial intelligence support” opens up new capabilities and introduces efficiency, productivity, and minimization of human error. All that aside, let’s dive into traditional and AI-backed methods.
Traditional Methods
Most of the time, a multitude of tasks are handled by retail store workers who stock shelves, check groceries, decorate items, so they look appealing, and also monitor the freshness of vegetables and fruits. These are just a few of the responsibilities they are in charge of. Food quality is determined by factors such as uniformity, ripeness, color, gloss, and the lack of imperfections. Visual inspection of the condition of groceries may not be a good option as it can be subjective, which ultimately results in the absence of a standard and inefficiency. Instead of controlling the freshness of fruits and vegetables, directing employees to different tasks will be a more profitable and effective result, and this is exactly the point when you need to take advantage of AI technology.
Through Artificial Intelligence Technology
Besides traditional methods, artificial intelligence technology started to be integrated into every field more rapidly day by day. With its bleeding-edge capabilities, AI creates significant opportunities for productivity gains and reduces time, costs, and human errors. All the quality factors mentioned above are more advantageous and effortless compared to the traditional methods, both financially and operationally. Let’s explain through an example. AI is able to predict outcomes based on real-time monitoring and data analysis. First, it detects rotten products and warns a responsible person. Later on, it goes over patterns in previously gathered data that can show whether the products can be sold in the current store or worth sending products to other stores with higher sales volume. In this way, it makes an outstanding contribution to the delivery of products to the consumer without spoiling.
How Cognitiwe Fresh Food Monitoring outsmart?
Cognitiwe’s Fresh Food Monitoring continuously learns and develops valuable insights and offers increasingly detailed analysis and predictions for retails. The daily operations can be automated with deep learning. The Fresh Food monitoring employs a computer vision technology that uses a large amount of real-world data and passes an extensive training cycle. It is also precisely trained to assess what attributes should be collected and store the necessary data for action planning. Leveraging deep learning, Fresh Food Monitoring is trained with fruit and vegetable images, and this makes the system more accurate and, crucially – more consistent than the human eye. The best part of Cognitiwe Fresh Food Monitoring is being able to use the existing regular IP cameras without any extra infrastructure investment. On top of the Fresh Food Monitoring, Cognitiwe’s Smart Stock solution also enables retailers to manage shelf placements, product display stock levels with Shelf Stock & Planogram Analysis, and detect fraud & shrinkage at check-out aisles and self-checkout kiosks with Cognitiwe Predictive Vision AI Platform.
Why Need Cognitiwe?
Consider how much more could be accomplished if a smart assistant simply tracked the freshness of fruits and vegetables. If the visual inspection were performed on a small percentage of your products before Cognitiwe because of employees’ limited capability, you might now have control all over the products without adding extra labor while also improving the accuracy. After analyzing the product photos taken by the camera system, Fresh Food Monitoring not only reports instant decay but also warns the period of the time it may rot as a result of the data obtained from past analyzes. As mentioned earlier, the quality criterion of different units or people can be subjective. Every time and in every place, Cognitiwe’s solution functions in the same way. This implies more consistency in your processes and clearer visibility into your financial operations. Finally, Cognitiwe could help reduce the amount of food waste and damages due to return.
Easy to Use
We mentioned that the implementation of Cognitiwe is easy. In addition, this process includes four steps:
- Select Input: You can select input between your options in this step. The options include “live feeds from Ip cameras, VOD content, and images.”
- Choose What to Analyze: You are expected to choose among different Vision AI models here.
- Train Objects: You can train objects or gestures extracted from camera inputs or VOD content.
- Get Output: You can get your outputs in the way you prefer.
At the end of this process, you can successfully achieve good monitoring with all the benefits of Cognitiwe.
Striking Features of The Cognitiwe Smart Stock
Even if we talked about Cognitiwe Smart Stock’s feature of fresh food monitoring, it also provides various solutions for retailers. Cognitiwe’s technology has shelf stock & planogram analysis, which estimates the stock levels of product displays and boxed products on the shelves. This technology is fast and accurate since the Cognitiwe Predictive Vision AI Platform powers it. It is also trained and optimized to verify whether the products are incorrect position and quantity. Another Cognitiwe Smart Stock solution is fraud & shrinkage detection. This platform monitors check-out aisles and self-service kiosks to detect fraud and shrinkage. For such sensitive use cases, Cognitiwe makes sure to work in 100% compliance with GDPR and other relevant regulations.
