2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Emerging Retail Technology finalists include Hanshow, ZigZag, and shopreme
We’re pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Emerging Retail Technology Innovation of the Year category. We received a record number of entries this year and many fantastic examples of technology excellence driving transformative change across the global retail sector.
Check out a rundown of our 2026 shortlists and finalists here.
Congratulations to all those who made it through the initial submission process! It’s now over to our star studded judging panel who will decide the winners to be announced at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Ceremony, taking place at The HAC in Central London.
The event will be held on Wednesday, 4th November and consist of a drinks reception, three course meal, awards ceremony presided over by award winning stand-up comedian, presenter, actor and broadcaster, Aurie Styla, and after party until 1am.
Click here to book your place at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, 4th November.
Our 2026 Emerging Retail Technology Innovation of the Year finalists as follows:
AIMETECH
Chefs For Foodies (CFF) is a curated dropship marketplace for UK speciality food and premium kitchen brands. It works with more than 100 artisan brands, including DeliVita, Tracklements, Hilltop Honey and Luigi Bormioli, and lists over 1,000 products.
Stock stays with the producer until it sells. AIMETECH is building an agentic commerce platform for CFF on top of this model
Augmodo
Augmodo builds physical AI infrastructure powered by wearable computer vision for frontline teams. Store associates wear a passive Smartbadge during normal shifts.
As they move, outward facing cameras capture shelf conditions, using egocentric vision models to build a dynamic 3D spatial map of inventory, identifying out-of-stocks, gaps, and misplaced items in real time.
EDEKA and eyefactive
EDEKA Jensen in Uetersen near Hamburg runs the first self-order kiosk at a fresh food counter within EDEKA. Since December 2025 the EasyOrder Terminal has let customers place their meat and sausage order on a touchscreen, carry on shopping while the counter team prepares it, and collect it at the self-service counter. Payment happens at the regular checkout.
Fixit
Talos is an AI sales and support agent for online shops that works from the shop's own live data: catalogue, stock, prices, shipping rules and orders. One agent answers on web chat, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, recommends in-stock products using the merchant's own attributes, answers "where is my order", hands over to a human when needed, and writes the shop's product copy from the same catalogue.
It runs on Fixit's own GPU infrastructure in the EU, with no third-party model API. Live in production with 18 retailers across WooCommerce, Magento 2, Shopify and custom storefronts.
Focal Systems
Computer vision in stores has mostly been judged on detection: how many empty shelves a system finds. Focal Systems has taken it further. Fixed cameras read every shelf in the store every hour, and in 2026 that view extended to the stock stacked above the shelf and, in trials, the back room.
The system now matches each gap to stock the store already has, sends staff a prioritised task, and uses the same camera to confirm the gap was filled. Focal runs 500,000 cameras in more than 1,000 stores, captures over 40 million shelf scans a day, and has confirmed more than 23 million gaps filled.
Goddiva
Goddiva is a British occasionwear brand using emerging AI technology to transform how customers discover, choose and purchase fashion online.
Its proprietary AI ecosystem combines conversational commerce, semantic search, intelligent personalisation, AI powered product tagging, Fit Intelligence, Virtual Try-On and automated customer support within one connected retail experience. Customer interactions also generate intelligence that improves search, merchandising and product development.
GrowStocks
GrowStocks reads a UK FMCG brand's own weekly retailer data and finds the store level stockouts that stay invisible inside a "healthy" national figure. No new systems, no analyst required just automated detection that ranks every issue by pounds lost per day and tells you exactly who needs to fix it.
Hanshow
Hanshow, shopreme and Lucky Cart are building a connected Smart Cart ecosystem that brings digital retail capabilities directly into the physical shopping journey.
Combining Hanshow’s Smart Cart hardware platform, shopreme’s in-store operating system and Lucky cart’s retail media expertise, the solution creates a scalable foundation for modern grocery retail.
InnoXR Labs
InnoXR Labs’ Atmos OS is an intelligence layer for physical retail that turns in-store customer interactions into decisions retailers can act on.
Using glasses free holographic and interactive surfaces (HoloInteract, AR Mirror, Smart Kiosk, Retrofit Kit) plus on-device Edge AI, Atmos OS shows what attracts attention, what gets ignored, and what shoppers respond to, then helps adapt on-display content.
Mys Tyler
Fashion tech startup, Mys Tyler, partnered with City Chic to improve shopper fit confidence and reduce online returns. Using Mys Tyler’s FitCheck technology, the partnership combined diverse creators, visual fit reviews and structured fit data. This content was embedded on City Chic’s product pages across Australia, New Zealand and the US.
shopreme
At retailers like famila Nordost, shopreme's snap cart Smart Cart software transforms shopping carts into a digital self-checkout touchpoint: shoppers "snap on" the Hanshow Smart Cart tablet, scan products, receive personalised assistance, recommendations, and coupons, and check out directly on the cart.
ZigZag
ZigZag launched its WhatsApp Returns initiative to respond to a fundamental shift in consumer expectations: post-purchase experiences must now be as fast, intuitive, and mobile first as the purchase itself.
