Box Way | Grocery shopping experience
Product-Service System Design
Academic project @Politecnico di Milano - Bachelor degree in Industrial Product Design
In collaboration with Epta Refrigeration
Designer: Greta Gamba
Oct 2017 - Jan 2018
The project, carried out in collaboration with Epta Group (a company specialized in commercial refrigeration for large-scale retailers), was aimed at rethinking the experience of buying fruits and vegetables in supermarkets.
Some problems have been identified in the current shopping experience. In particular:
- The sequence of actions for the purchase of fresh products, which involves a waste of plastic bags and gloves, but also of time.
- The limits regarding semi-finished or ready-to-use products, sold already packaged in varieties and quantities not suitable for all types of users.
SOLUTION
Box Way is a configurable supermarket corner composed of an exhibition area for the purchase of fresh products and a showcooking area for the purchase of semi-finished or ready-to-eat products.
It is not just a corner, but a completely new purchasing process, which exploits the technology’s potential to make the grocery shopping experience simple, interactive and intelligent.
INTERACTION
The user, once registered to the service, can access all the corners in the network via a mobile app.
Inside the corner the user can access two different services:
- Purchase of fresh products: All the user has to do is choose a box, couple it to his/her profile and move between the shelves of the corner picking the desired products inside the box. The technology present in the corner automatically performs the weighing and pricing operations.
- Purchase of semi-finished or ready-to-use products: During the purchase experience, the user can also consult the list of available processes for a given product. The user can order them in the amount that best suits his/her needs and pick them up from the show-cooking area once they are ready.
TECHNOLOGIES
The presence of the box in one of the stations is identified by a photocell, which activates:
- A QR code reader located below the plan, which, through the glass, reads the code under the box and from that moment associates the operations carried out in that station with a specific user.
- Two weight sensors placed under the boxes containing the products on the shelves. They are calibrated upon the arrival of a customer and from that moment they collect data about the type of products and weight subtraction to attribute the right price to the user.
FUNCTIONAL DETAILS
The corner is equipped with working areas designed like kitchens, where salespeople process food in front of people. Here, refrigerated areas are used to preserve fruit and vegetables. Their position allows the salespeople both to easily refill the shelves and to have products within easy reach for food processing.
The metal shelves, in addition to displaying the products, allow magnetic panels with info about the products to be easily updated and installed on the structure.
The furniture at the base is designed not only to provide to users a support surface for their boxes, but also to obtain additional storage areas.
The login/logout stations are equipped with nfc to allow users to make payments independently and quickly.
MODEL
During the project a scale model of the corner was created.
