Good Food Holdings and Instacart will open the first Instacart Platform-powered Connected Store at a Bristol Farms location in Irvine, Calif. The supermarket will utilize the Connected Stores experience to help shoppers move seamlessly between the retailer’s app, website and in-store experience.
The Bristol Farms store will use Instacart’s Caper Cart technology, which enables smart carts equipped with scales, sensors, touchscreens and computer vision to power scanless technology that lets shoppers browse the store and check out without needing to manually scan items. Additionally, shoppers can utilize Instacart’s List technology to sync their in-app shopping lists with the smart carts by scanning a QR code, letting the cart help customers find the items they need and automatically check them off the list as they are collected.
Customers also can choose to scan items as they shop and pay for them from their mobile phones instead of using a smart cart. The mobile scan feature also identifies EBT SNAP-eligible products to make it easier for shoppers to identify approved items.
The Instacart Platform also will provide Carrot Tags to power electronic shelf labels that help customers, associates or Instacart shoppers find what they need. Users can select an item on their phone to see a light on its corresponding shelf tag, which also can display key information like gluten-free, organic, kosher or EBT SNAP-eligible labels.
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The Bristol Farms location also will have access to FoodStorm Department Orders, an order management system that helps grocers manage customer orders for items like baked goods, hot items and deli sandwiches. The tool enables different prepared foods departments within a store to collaborate so that they can have customers’ orders ready at the correct time.
The Instacart Platform’s Out of Stock Insights API will assist the grocery store by providing automatic real-time alerts to associates when items are running low or out of stock. This feature aims to reduce missed sales opportunities for retailers while increasing the chance that customers can find exactly what they are looking for.
“At Good Food Holdings, we’re proud to provide our customers with a personalized shopping experience — whether they’re opting to build their baskets online or joining us in-store,” said Neil Stern, CEO of Good Food Holdings in a statement. “As customers have adopted delivery and pickup over the past year, we’ve found it increasingly important to evolve our business with omnichannel customers at the forefront. As we look to the next decade of grocery, we want to make sure that we’re providing an inspirational shopping trip for our customers — and this starts by building a Connected Store.”
