X5 Retail Group, Russia’s largest food retailer, announces that its Perekrestok supermarket chain has launched the large-scale implementation of the Green Dot labelling system for monitoring product freshness. Ten million labels will be placed on items from the X5 Smart Kitchen assortment of ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook foods, making it the largest rollout of this technology in Europe.
The Green Dot label contains smart sensors that show the current temperature of each item and its compliance with storage requirements. This lets customers and employees see the freshness of a particular item in real-time and receive accurate information about its actual remaining shelf life.
The Green Dot project is being implemented in partnership with the retailtech startup Evigence Sensors®, which offers an innovative lineup of small, low-cost freshness sensors. As part of the joint project, four product packaging lines have been equipped with Green Dot label applicators, with an average of 30 Green Dot labels applied every minute.
Tatiana Rakhmanova, Managing Director of X5 Ready Food, commented:
“The modern pace of life is accelerating, and ready-made food is playing an increasingly important role in the diets of our consumers, who have come to expect high-quality products. By introducing a freshness guarantee based on an independent printable sensor that tracks each item’s storage conditions, we are offering our customers a new level of quality and transparency, which will boost confidence in our products and our brand.”
Each sensor is specially engineered to correspond to the time-temperature effects for the food it is designed for. The sensor changes colour if the shelf life is about to expire or in case of non-compliance with storage conditions. Before labelling, the printable sensor is activated using special equipment.
The use of dynamic freshness indicator technology allows for independent monitoring of the quality and storage conditions of products by both employees and customers. This, in turn, will help to increase customer confidence in Smart Kitchen products and boost NPS for X5’s ready-to-eat product offering.
Please see the attached release for the full information, as well as an image of the Green Dot label and a video of the label printer in action, which are available for use with credit to X5 Retail Group. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions.
