The company is entering the in-store technology space that contains heavyweights such as Amazon and Kroger.
The grocery conglomerate will make Veeve Smart Carts available to customers at a few dozen stores across the country. Once launched later this year, consumers will be able to use the smart carts to skip the checkout line with a streamlined and contactless way to shop.
Veeve Smart Carts will provide a frictionless shopping experience for Albertsons shoppers, enabled by a touchscreen that provides a running total for in-cart items and a built-in scale for produce purchase. The retailer also plans to integrate the tech-enhanced carts with its Albertsons for U loyalty program. Once done shopping, customers can complete payment on their cart and walk out, skipping the checkout line.
Amazon introduced a similar smart cart called Amazon Dash Cart, which it deploys at select locations of its Amazon Fresh brick-and-mortar grocery format, in July 2020. Leveraging a combination of computer vision algorithms and sensor fusion to identify items customers put in the cart and connecting directly to customer Amazon accounts, Dash Cart streamlines the shopping experience a bit further by enabling automatic payment.
And in October 2021, Instacart acquired Caper AI, a provider of “smart cart” and automated checkout counter solutions. Caper’s object recognition system lets customers place items into their cart without having to scan or weigh them, and check out right at the cart.
