East of England Co-op deploys ESLs within Retail Insight AI powered WasteInsight solution

East of England Co-op has extended its partnership with Retail Insight for a further three years.

The pair have been working together since 2021, with the retailer leveraging the cloud-based WasteInsight solution to tackle food waste across its estate. 

Powered by cognitive technology, this includes forecasting accuracy, expiration management, dynamic markdowns and donations to charities.    

East of England Co-op taps WasteInsight to drive better expiration management and smarter markdowns using the Prompted and Dynamic Markdown features within the solution.

Its team works with Retail Insight to implement algorithm changes to optimise the time between each markdown, reducing the burden on store associates improving labour productivity.   

As part of its extended partnership, Retail Insight has integrated East of England Co-op’s electronic shelf-edge labels (ESLs) into WasteInsight to drive up labour productivity associated with produce expiration management and markdowns. 

The solution pushes alerts to store associates’ hand-held devices, notifying them of any near-expiry items that need discounting. Said device then provides an option for store-associates to force the ESL for the product in question to flash, making it easier and quicker for them to identify, implement and process markdowns.  

Following a pilot, East of England Co-op has now rolled out the solution in 18 stores and plans to go live in all of its ESL equipped food stores by September of this year.  

Robert Hawkins, Senior Project Manager at East of England Co-op, comments: "We are thrilled to have successfully piloted the integration between our ESLs and Retail Insight's Prompted Markdown solution.”

“As we roll-out across our estate, we are confident that we will continue to reap the rewards of streamlined processes, and we are excited to get feedback from our store colleagues." 

Kieran O'Brien, UK Client Director at Retail Insight, says: "The work we are doing with ESL integrations across the East of England Co-op estate will ensure that we can drastically reduce the amount of time store associates spend looking for products to be marked down.”

“The beauty of the integration is in its simplicity - because our solution works with retailers’ foundational data and is product agnostic, it can work with any ESL model and can be fully scalable across a retailer's estate.”  

2024 RTIH INNOVATION AWARDS

ESLs are a key focus area for the sixth edition of the RTIH Innovation Awards, which is now open for entries.

The awards, sponsored by CADS, 3D Cloud, Retail Technology Show 2025, and Business France, celebrate global tech innovation in a fast moving omnichannel world.

It’s free to enter and you can do so across multiple categories.

Key 2024 dates

Friday, 25th October: Award entry deadline 

Tuesday, 29th October: 2024 shortlist revealed

30th October-6th November: Judging days

Thursday, 21st November: Winners announced at the 2024 RTIH Innovation Awards ceremony, to be held at RIBA’s 66 Portland Place HQ in Central London.