Announcement: First hybrid autonomous Shufersal supermarket in central Tel Aviv

I am happy to announce that we are opening a Trigo-powered store with Israel’s largest grocery retailer, Shufersal. It goes without saying that we are excited to launch a store in Tel Aviv, which is not only the home of the world-renowned ‘startup nation,’ but Trigo’s HQ as well. This Shufersal branch is representative of Tel Aviv, between its proximity to the beach as well as its central location; it is in the hub of the innovation capital of Israel. This was no accident – Shufersal deliberately chose the heart of a city full of open-minded and tech-savvy people as the home for the country’s first frictionless checkout store.

Although Israel is a small country, it is a strong economic force. Israel is also an interesting market because its grocery retailers are strong entities with significant capital to invest in new technologies and it is full of innovative citizens who are excited by the latest in tech. Many companies test their products and features in Israel because of this culture and mindset, as well as for the rich feedback they collect to improve their product as they scale to new and larger markets. The same goes for our partnership with Shufersal – it will help us further push our products and offerings.

In fact, it already has. In this Tel Aviv store, we are implementing price-embedded barcodes for the first time, which has posed new challenges and solutions for our offerings that we can apply to future POCs or rollout stores. Additionally, in Israel, fresh fruit and vegetables are sold by weight, so to align with the local market’s buying habits, we worked together with Shufersal to provide a solution for weighted items. Lastly, this Shufersal store has the most SKUs per square meter out of our Trigo-powered stores. This is an important metric since the supermarket challenge the industry is facing is not the size of the store, but rather the number of products. By solving this challenge, we further advance our ambitious goals of opening increasingly larger stores over the coming years.

Shufersal’s deep commitment to creating the best possible experience for their customers by implementing the latest technology has made them excellent innovation partners in achieving these technological milestones. The strong collaboration and communication have been invaluable as we continually improve our product and set ourselves up for the next big innovation in autonomous stores.

Michael.