If the light’s on, the beer’s gone

Challenge

Beer is the 3rd most consumed beverage in the world after water and tea, so it’s no surprise that keeping brews available on shelves remains an elusive challenge for smaller format convenience store operators who run lean with only a couple staff members at any given point in time.

Now, let’s talk party packs. While there’s plenty of room in the back coolers to store these 12, 24 and larger pack sizes, fridge space is pretty limited to only a few packs at a time. This ‘brews’ up the perfect storm - high demand, limited fridge space, and limited time/ability to restock.

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Implementation

Retail Aware has partnered with a top selling beer brand and national c-store chain to build out a simple, scalable solution leveraging our award-winning BiaaS platform and proprietary sense devices.

The concept is simple - proprietary active light sense devices are placed in-shelf, underneath product to tell if there was beer on top or not. When it no longer detects beer, an alert is sent to a credit-card sized base station located at the checkout register, that then lights up.

In the future, incentives for store employees around resolving light ups and preventing them in the first place, are all on the table.

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Results

The proof of concept was a success. Employees were alerted when beer was not stocked and able to stock it quicker than before, thus increasing sales. Multiple stakeholders including the brand, a national c-store retailer, and others decided to expand the program after seeing the initial success.

• Following digital promotions to store purchase to directly track sales lift
• Conversion percentages from different areas of the store
• POS totals against total number of in-store engagements
• Increased sales and engagement data to leverage placement in other store locations
• Testing data for in-store signage to sales lift

All of this in-store data is provided to the client in real time, on Retail Aware’s dashboards. The program is officially moving from concept to launching in multiple c-store locations for Summer 2021.

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