Hybrid autonomous store in the heart of Tel Aviv

Hello Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv has many names: the “white city” for its largest number of international-style buildings (e.g. Bauhaus) in the world, the “startup nation’s capital” for its high concentration of startups, or the “city that never sleeps” for its parallels to New York City’s non-stop nature. People come from all over the world to experience Tel Aviv’s unique energy, beaches, world-class culinary experiences, and nightlife scene.

Within a minute of walking down the street in Tel Aviv, you can see young professionals riding scooters to work, tourist groups enjoying the architecture, and locals who have lived in the city for decades. The “startup nation’s capital,” also attracts the brightest minds in tech and business to build the latest innovations. The creativity can be felt in every cafe with people brainstorming their next startup, or on every street, with street artists making old buildings come alive with their artwork.

A frictionless makeover

Located in central Tel Aviv, a mere five-minute walk from one of the city’s busiest beaches, Shufersal’s first Trigo-powered store on Mendeli street will serve the young and diverse local community. The wide variety of customers visiting the store is why Shufersal chose a hybrid model – to ensure that the store would be able to cater to every type of shopper.

This store was chosen due to its prime location, but also for its size and function – to provide the full supermarket experience in the middle of the city via a classic urban, convenience-sized store with extensive and diverse offerings. This store has the most SKUs per square foot out of all Trigo-powered stores, providing shoppers with all their supermarket needs, ranging from frozen food to dry items to fresh meat, poultry, and produce, in only 1,080 square feet of space.

Working with Shufersal

Shufersal is Israel’s largest grocer and has always emphasized innovation. They were the first in Israel to implement self-checkout kiosks in their stores, so Trigo’s frictionless checkout solution was the obvious next step in the evolution of technological innovation in grocery. To further ensure the project’s success, Shufersal built an app from the ground up to support the frictionless checkout experience and make the entire onboarding process seamless.

“Since this store with Shufersal has the most SKUs per square foot out of all Trigo-powered stores, it posed unique challenges for our technology,” says Erez Arbel, Trigo’s Chief Product Officer, about the partnership. He explains, “for example, we had to overcome physical barriers, such as narrow aisles and taller shelves, which allow for more SKUs in a smaller store. Solving these has extended our technological capabilities to support larger product density and unique store layouts, enabling us to scale our solution to an even wider array of store shapes and sizes.”

“These milestones are the outcome of our close collaboration with Shufersal, whose commitment to their customers and innovation has helped push our technology further towards our mutually ambitious goals of seamless shopping and store operations.”