Blockchain at Carrefour for Quality

Has now become a classic application of blockchain supply chain.  Worked with Carrefour in supply chain space.

Carrefour uses blockchain to offer consumers greater supply chain transparency

BLOCKCHAIN CARREFOUR SA FOOD SAFETY FRESH FOODS LOGISTICS/SUPPLY CHAIN SUPERMARKETS, Apr 18, 2022, by Tom Ryan in Retailwire    with further elicited comments.  

Carrefour has become the first retailer to use blockchain technology with its own branded organic products.

The distributed ledger technology behind bitcoin enables consumers to scan the QR code on a label to access information about the life cycle of a product, including:

Its origin and the pathway it has taken: Producer name, field location, packaging location and transport means; 

Its quality: Harvest date, analysis results, variety and seasonality; 

Its organic certification: Conversion date, official certificate and additional initiatives implemented by the producer.

“By using this technology with our organic products for the first time, we are delivering on our aim of becoming the leader in the food transition for everyone,” Benoît Soury, Carrefour organic market director, said in a statement. 

Blockchain systems store data securely and in a tamper-proof manner. Potentially replacing paper processes and disjointed data systems, the enhanced data visibility from blockchain promises to more quickly resolve food safety issues as well as overcome inaccurate supply and demand predictions, manual errors, counterfeiting and compliance violations.

Walmart began using IBM’s Food Trust blockchain technology to track lettuce and spinach in 2018, but the technology has been only slowly gaining traction despite the hype around cryptocurrencies.  Hurdles slowing mainstream adoption include a general lack of knowledge on blockchain and its applications, customization issues and challenges correlating the multiple ways data can be submitted. ... ' 

Nestle and Carrefour Track Baby Milk

Another tracking and safety identification example.

Nestle, Carrefour Extend Blockchain Tracking Effort to Baby Milk   By Daniel Palmer in Coindesk

Nothing is more important to new parents than the safety of their infants, and food giants Nestle and Carrefour aim to use blockchain to help appease that instinct.

Following on from a previous food tracking effort by the two companies, based on IBM’s Food Trust platform, Nestle and Carrefour will track baby milk products and provide consumers with data on their origins and movements “from dairy to shelf.”

Specifically, the GUIGOZ Bio 2 and 3 infant milk range will be traced on the blockchain platform as a means to provide consumers with more information on the milks origins and transparency on product checks, Carrefour said in an announcement on Thursday. Customers will be able to scan a QR code on the milk’s packaging to access a range of information.  ... " 

Google Deals with Retailer Carrefour to Sell Groceries Online

We worked with Carrefour in our innovation spaces and in France and China.  Looks like Home and Google Assistant will be utilized. Emphasis on fresh foods.  Competition seems to be driving this.  Amazon has just announced rollout of Echo in France.

Google Enters Deal With Carrefour to Sell Food Online in France  By Robert Williams in Bloomberg

Alphabet Inc.’s Google entered a deal with Carrefour SA to sell groceries online in France in what the retailer said was the first time fresh food will be marketed through the Internet giant’s platforms.

By early 2019, French shoppers will be able to buy Carrefour’s products through Google platforms including Home, Assistant and the Google shopping destination in France, the retailer said in a statement. Carrefour didn’t comment on the financial structure of the deal.

Competition in the French supermarket business has been heating up as grocers race to boost their digital offerings. Casino Guichard Perrachon SA in March announced a deal to sell products from its Monoprix stores via Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime service in the Paris area, following a deal last year between Casino and grocery e-commerce technology provider Ocado Group Plc. ... " 

Carrefour and Romanian Beacons

An interesting place to try this test.   In RFID Journal.  We worked with Carrefour on technology tests.  Several previous posts mention Carrefour beacon activity, use the tag link below.

Carrefour Puts Beacons in Its Romanian Hypermarkets
The retailer permanently installed technology from Onyx Beacon to help it better engage with customers, deliver promotional offers and guide them through the stores.   ... " 

Retailer Carrefour Leverages Store Beacons

Have worked some with global retailer Carrefour, and never thought of them as a technical innovation retailer, so interesting to see this development.  Article mentions they have done mobile Apps since  2012 and started beacons in 2014. A fairly detailed piece in Mobile Commerce Daily.

" ... Multinational retailer Carrefour recently saw a 400 percent increase in mobile application engagement thanks to beacons, pointing to the technology’s ability to significantly influence shoppers when paired with mobile coupons in a supermarket setting.

Carrefour teamed up with beacon provider Kontakt.io to roll out the technology in-store and send push notifications to consumers upon arrival, suggest products based on purchases made in the past and also display relevant coupons. In a seven-month period, the brand’s number of app users skyrocketed by 600 percent, while in-app time increased 400 percent, which fueled additional sales and streamlined shopping experiences. ... " 

Retailer Carrefour to Test Beacons

In RFID Journal:  Another example of a data gathering activity that can lead to better analytics when combined with loyalty and other data.  Good detail in this article.

" ... Multinational retail chain operator Carrefour is planning to test Bluetooth beacons to track the movements of shopping carts at three of its Madrid stores this fall. The technology, provided by Proximus, is intended to allow the anonymous tracking of shoppers as they move through the stores, by identifying not an individual shopper himself but rather the shopping cart he is pushing. While in the long run, Proximus intends to offer the solution as part of a retailer's loyalty program that would track individuals via their mobile phones (as long as they opted in), the first step is merely to determine the carts' locations, rather than identify the shoppers using them ... " 

EZ Face Virtual Mirror

I just posted some questions about implementations of EZ Face Virtual Mirror  and got the following response, Thanks!

Following your post about the Virtual Mirror, here is some information about our retail project:

Duane Read – We have a kiosk at the new store at 40 Wall street. Also attached is a video that introduces our technology at DR store.
Douglas (Germany) – We have started a rollout of our kiosks in Douglas retail chain in Germany.
Galleries Lafayette (France) – We have some kiosks in GL stores in France.
Carrefour Planet (France) – We have started a rollout of our kiosks in Carrefour Planet retail chain in France ... 

 Some good examples, see the links to the above.  Good to see this is moving forward.I liked what I saw when I looked at it a number of years ago. 

Self-Scanning at Carrefour

Retailer Carrefour is offering a self-scan mobile personal scanner device for shoppers in Beligium.  First I have seen Carrefour do this.  I still think that the future of this kind of capability is in the use of Smart Phones that can scan through their camera.  That capability continues to improve.

Carrefour Reinventing the Hypermarket

An interesting piece that seems to indicate that mega French retailer Carrefour is taking a more revolutionary than evolutionary approach in design. Nice to see this direction. Considerable statistical data from pilot stores is included in the piece.

Extended Packaging Becomes Reality

From Global standards body GS1, the concept of extended packaging allows the consumer to gather unlimited information from packaging via devices. For example a barcode reader on a smartphone enables extended packaging. Mobile commerce marches on for retail:

Extended Packaging is a reality for consumers
GS1 MobileCom brings key stakeholders together in Paris to define next steps for standards-based mobile commerce
For further information, contact Joe Horwood at joe.horwood@gs1.org or +32 473 33 47 85.

Brussels, Belgium, 25 November 2009 – A group of over 60 people from global brands and retailers including Nestlé, Kraft, L’Oréal, Coca-Cola, Walmart, Metro and Carrefour, solution providers and staff from local GS1 offices met in Paris last week to build the future of mobile commerce together ... '

Tesco to Become No. 2 Retailer

Report: Tesco to become world's second-largest retailer
Global expansion in China, the U.S. and India will boost Britain's Tesco to the second-largest retailer by 2012. Wal-Mart will remain the front-runner, and France's Carrefour will drop to the third-largest retailer, according to the IGD report. Google/The Associated Press (12/9)

Carrefour and Teradata Business Intelligence

Mega global retailer Carrefour is reportedly giving their business intelligence work to Teradata. Teradata is widely used in retail.

Future Value Chain

Quoting Alan Kay's famous line "The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Create it" ... From the Global Commerce Initiative (GCI) , Intel and Cap Gemini, a 46-page paper published in October 2006: The 2016 Value Chain, with a forword by P&G's AG Lafley and Jose Luis Duran of Carrefour and a number of manufacturing and retail contributors. A good, but general overview of the how the next 10 years will evolve our view of value chains. Nothing tremendously new here, but lays out what we should be thinking about. Includes mention of virtual reality, quantum computing and 'Wikipedia style collaboration' as means of delivering aspects of this new value chain view. Minimal mention of analytical methods. Also just a few mentions of RFID. Well worth a read, provides a basic grounding in the value chain world.