When shopping carts recognise thieves

EuroCIS, which claims to be Europe's leading trade fair for retail technology, recorded the strongest growth in its 26-year history with 475 exhibitors from 41 countries. Over 13,500 trade visitors from 95 countries came to the two fully booked exhibition halls in Düsseldorf to discover innovations and technology trends in retail.

According to Erhard Wienkamp, managing director of Messe Düsseldorf, the 15th edition of EuroCIS clearly surpassed the previous event in 2019 both in terms of net exhibition space of 14,400m² and visitor numbers. "Almost half of the visitors come to the trade fair with investment plans,” he said.

AI and machine learning, mobile payment and smart checkout technologies are the trending topics, while cyber security is moving into focus and was even discussed for the first time at the trade fair. Roland Zigerli pointed out that 100 percent of all companies are attacked digitally. The Fortinet business development manager explained that it is only a question of when, not if. Against this backdrop and in the face of increasingly diverse threats, the Fortinet Security Platform can secure IT infrastructures and reduce the time it takes to detect an attack from 21 days to less than an hour.

Partially and fully autonomous stores, automatic object recognition at checkouts and scales, service robots, energy-saving ESLs (electronic shelf labels), smart shopping carts, interactive kiosks and shop windows, retail media systems and versatile payment solutions were very well received.

Pentlant Firth demonstrated the Easy Shopper, which is in use at Edeka Hannover-Minden. "The intelligent shopping cart provides offers when entering the store and simplifies shopping through indoor navigation, the easy use of shopping lists and a checkout without cash registers," explained Joszef Gabor, vice-president of sales. The system has been user-tested since 2019, with 6,700 shopping carts in over 175 stores and over 25 million completed purchases.

"What is innovative about Easy Shopper?" asked Jozsef Gabor and immediately demonstrated: the login via QR code, products can be scanned or added via search, the integrated AI compares the shopping cart with two cameras and scales with image analysis and object recognition ("Red Bull recognised, but not scanned. Please check!") and thus offers protection against and reduction of theft - there is even a guarantee for the theft reduction rate agreed.

"The self-service solutions, which use AI, computer vision and edge…