When SmartFLASH electronic shelf labels help reduce the ecological footprint and food waste.
Waste management and environmental protection are rapidly increasing societal and economic issues. While we are aware of the harmful causes of plastic and paper for our planet, we still take little account of how damaging food waste can be to the environment. Yet, retailers are one of the biggest contributors to food waste. It is no surprise that they need innovative and productive solutions to be able to reduce this phenomenon.
How can electronic shelf labels contribute to reducing the ecological footprint and fighting waste?
The environmental impact
The price tags could produce almost 120,000 tonnes of waste per year. As most labels are plastic or self-adhesive paper, they are unrecyclable due to their material, resulting in more waste in landfills. As reducing label waste from shelves becomes important for retailers, here is how our PRICER SmartFLASH solution can help them.
Our SmartFLASH electronic shelf labels are automated pricing solutions that enable price changes in synchronized way without creating new waste. In fact, instead of changing and destroying self-adhesive paper labels each time a price update is needed, our SmartFLASH electronic labels allow retailers to easily change prices on shelves, in real time for 10 years. Once the battery life is consumed, the old labels are recycled, reducing the environmental footprint of merchants significantly.
The fight against food waste
In Canada, nearly 58% of the food produced is wasted, while a third of food loss can actually be saved and avoided. The problem of food waste stems from two main circumstances: the inability to sell food before its expiry date, then throwing away food that reaches its sell-by date.
To reduce and avoid the amount of food thrown away, an effective strategy adopted by stores is to sell products approaching the expiration date at discount prices. Many retailers have recognized the benefit of offering discounts to boost sales and free up shelves.
Thanks to our SmartFLASH electronic shelf labels from PRICER, communicating price reductions in real time and launching promotions become very easy to display.
Moreover, integrating AI-driven dynamic pricing solution such as Wasteless or Whywaste with our PRICER electronic shelf labels allows a simple and sustainable shopping experience for customers, but also to drastically reduce the time spent on product date-checking management while increasing in-store revenues for retailers. According to Wasteless’ customer surveys, 94% of shoppers understood how the discount system worked, and over 80% chose the discounted products when two price options were available.
The efficiency of inventory management
Fighting waste can also be done through good inventory management, which is the most important asset in sales operations. To effectively optimize inventory management, retailers often use smart technology to accurately check their stock levels in real time.
Inventory level information is displayed on our PRICER SmartFLASH electronic shelf labels. Using the instant flash of our electronic labels, retailers have the opportunity to better manage their inventory in less than half the time it typically takes and control how often their store is delivered and how much stock is delivered, resulting in losses reduction.
To conclude, our SmartFLASH electronic shelf labels from PRICER are an ecological solution that can help retailers lessen the waste management crisis and the environmental impact, and can also offer better performance of their inventory by predicting the level of their stock without the need of new resources.
