An acknowledged global truth in food retailing is that the information carried on the cases of, and individual fresh items to communicate the expiry date and messaging on when the item is "best" are small, difficult to locate, hard to read and sow confusion, especially when there are two dates, one would be the "best before" date [deemed to be when the item tastes, smells, etc the best] and the "use by" date. To this end, retailers have looked to remove information on expiry dates on items such as produce where common sense can be applied. There have also been efforts to remove the "best before" dates.

At the ECR Innovation Challenge in July 2019, one of the finalists that attracted a lot of attention was Evigence, a new start up who were bringing to the market a new smart label that based on time and temperature would change colour to indicate to store associates and the shopper the freshness of the product, and the proximity to the time when a price markdown would need to be considered.

In this session, Leonid (X5) will share their journey to date using these smart labels, outline the business case to date, and share future next steps. In the discussion that follows, other retailers will share their [if any] experiences with smart labels and overall, discuss their current thinking on date labelling improvement strategies.

This session is part of the two day working group meeting [Virtual background setting = Lyon] - the sessions are for retailers, producers and academics only. To register for this session or any of the others in this two day meeting or the rest of the year, click to register

May 19th - Where does the budget and KPI's for food waste and markdowns sit? Store or Central?

May 19th - Store Level Forecasting & Ordering - Retailer Case Study on the introduction of Machine Learning to Sell More and Waste Less

May 19th - Understanding the True Cost of Food Waste - Introducing a new financial model to count the true cost of food waste

May 20th - Retailer Case Study - One retailers journey towards zero waste

May 20th - Tesco and Olio - Introducing new ways to manage surplus food