Future Supermarket: overcoming Food Awareness challenges

Sergio González-Miranda, Ramón Alcarria, Tomás Robles, Augusto Morales

Telematics Department Telecommunications School

Madrid, Spain

{miranda , ralcarria, trobles, amorales}@dit.upm.es

Ignacio Gonzalez

ATOS Research Spain ignacio.gonzalezf@atosresearch.eu

Eloi Montcada

Lavola emontcada@lavola.com

Abstract—As consumers’ preferences evolve and product information grows in complexity, it becomes more difficult both for supermarkets to provide useful information describing products and for customers to select the most appropriate product based on social, ideological or particular preferences. Current shopping environments lack of specific tools for using customer profiles to provide them with information that really want to know (ecological, gluten free, etc.) about products. An IoT-leveraged information system is the perfect choice for filling the existing gap in the services for a Future Supermarket. This paper describes work done by implementing a methodology to involve customers in the development of a web pilot that contributes to the support of the Food Awareness concept by linking product information with consumer preferences deriving into faster product selection and speeding up purchase process. The web pilot developed is comprised of cloud-hosted interacting modules which fulfill requirements of customers. An analysis of user evaluation of web pilot is also presented.

IoT, M2M, user participation, information system development, co-creation, customisation, HTML5, Future Internet.

I. INTRODUCTION Modern supermarkets’ ecosystem is comprised of distinct

assets and activities primarily focused on providing customers with the most comfortable shopping environment. Those assets and activities are mostly described by: management of product stocks, labeling, shelf layout, aisles design, replenishment, special offers, discounts, fidelity cards and etcetera. Since customers’ expectations are continuously changing, supermarkets must adapt both their premises and once-successful legacy activities to fulfill those expectations and benefit from new service paradigms such as Internet of Things and Machine to Machine [17] communications. The evolution in this regard shall push forward the competitiveness of supermarkets [4].

Customers traditionally have been doing their shopping in a conventional manner by selecting more-known brands or products at most affordable prices. Nevertheless, more product options and new brands abound nowadays and it is more difficult to keep track of them all and the features they offer. A current trend in customer behavior is described by the selection of products that fit their personal interests.

Those interests are composed whether by personal preferences, health or ideological concerns which in turn result in new target products such as: vegetarians locally produced, transgenic, allergens-based and sustainability-based. The interests mentioned before are embraced by the Food Awareness [8] concept where consumers’ trust in food and the actors involved is a matter of top interest.

This paper exposes the methodology implemented to involve customers in the process of developing a solution based on the co-creation model [9] and open innovation concept [10]. The solution developed to provide tailored information to customers was designed with Future Internet (FI) principles in mind since integrates distinct sources of information and can incorporate standard identification management systems such as Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) [11]. Both validation of methodology and solution implementation has been carried out at a real supermarket environment.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section II gives background on the traditional approach for providing information to customers. In Section III, user participation in developments is exposed. Section IV describes the pilot that has been developed. Section V presents pilot’s conclusions regarding consumer opinion. Finally, Section VI summarizes this work.

II. BRINGING INFORMATION TO COSTUMERS Manufacturers are used to pack their products in an

attractive fashion and attach descriptive information tags based on what they expect to (or even want to) be useful for customers in order to influence the selection process. This classic approach tends to produce a myriad of commercial items with ambiguous information tags which derive into a negative impact both on manufacturers themselves and customers: • Manufacturers are affected as once their products are put

on circulation and at last are placed on the shelves in a supermarket, it becomes difficult to provide more accurate, granulated and advanced information that customers might require without the need of forcing the customer to surf to the manufacturer’s website.

• Customers must deal with reading of despair and heterogeneous descriptions of products that together form a source of misinformation that jeopardizes the

2013 Seventh International Conference on Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing

978-0-7695-4974-3/13 $26.00 © 2013 IEEE

DOI 10.1109/IMIS.2013.87

483

secure selection of items. Thus, their personal preferences become difficult to be matched with information shown on product tag.

The paragraphs above expose some of the existing

challenges to be satisfied in order to construct an information system for a Future Supermarket with Food-Awareness support.

Moreover, there is another plane involved in current challenges in this regard: multiple heterogeneous sources of information (Fig. 1).

On one hand, supermarkets usually manage information about price, stock and manufacturer/supplier of products, customer subscriptions and anonymous purchase logs. On the other hand, manufacturers manage all product information about ingredients, manufacturing techniques and origin of ingredients.

Meanwhile customers demand an accessible framework where preferences and interests can be set and updated. With this, their particular user profile can be built with the goal of obtaining personalized information about any particular product by performing simple gestures such as scanning a QR code with their smartphone.

Figure 1. Multiple heterogeneous information sources.

The assertions mentioned above identify manufacturers, supermarket and customers as the main actors involved in the conception of a Future Supermarket.

A Future Supermarket is envisioned to integrate new service architectures which enable and guarantee interoperability of heterogeneous sources of information and devices [6]. In this context, one of the adaptations a supermarket must perform is based on its customers’ knowledge, as well as how to implement an information management system that integrates the features of the products (origin, processing, chemical use, etcetera) that will be interesting for customers. This information will also be useful for profiling customers’ interests which is also one of the goals of the Future Internet’s platforms[5].

Another adaptation consists of enabling a platform where product value chain entities must collect, store and share information regarding: origin, health, logistics, social and environmental issues which in turn can be consumed by a

friendly and fast web interface. No additional plug-ins should be installed but standard smartphone features in order to expect an important grade of massive acceptance and exploitation by consumers.

The Smart Agri-Food Project [1] is part of the Future Internet Public-Private Partnership (FI-PPP) program [2] and addresses farming, agri-logistics and food awareness use-cases by aiming the boost of application and use of future internet ICTs [5] in the Agri-Food domain. As part of the Food Awareness use case, a pilot has been developed internetworking all the elements and mechanisms that enable consumers to request and retrieve information of a specific product using their smartphone. The information retrieved matches the consumers’ shopping profiles.

III. USER INVOLVEMENT BASED ON CO-CREATION APPROACH

As in [9] “Customers are stepping out of their traditional roles to become co-creators as well as consumers of value“, therefore we have seen as indispensable the involvement of customers in the development of the solution for a Future Supermarket. The involvement must be based on a two-way communication scheme to guarantee the proper interpretation of opinions through validation and being able to “use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market.. to advance technology”[10]. In this context, the availability of Project partners to organize workshops with customers became an essential mechanism to fulfill the needs of co-creation and co-development and make the most from external ideas, as exposed above.

User participation in services and applications design and development steps is a key aspect for understanding user needs and scenarios challenges and restrictions. Company support to users interested in creating value for themselves and for the company is in the realm of co-creation, which spans the entire range from idea generation to product development to post-provision occasions, like service execution and maintenance. Customization provided by co-creation give consumers the power to express their identities in a compelling experience as an experience characterized by fun, intrinsic enjoyment and engagement, which people try to maintain and seek to repeat [16].

User involvement is mandatory for the development of the personalized food awareness system which must be supported by advanced information processing and transferring capabilities of the Future Internet [5] which in turn opens new opportunities both for consumers to obtain specific information of products and for supermarkets to engage customers’ fidelity. Manufacturers and governments can also benefit from this development as contamination contingences can be communicated more accurately based on batch numbers and directed to consumers.

484

Figure 2. Food awareness relations.

The pilot features had to be specified using a user-centered methodology and developed with interoperability of data sources and knowledge across the product supply chain (Fig. 2). The design of the appropriate management system has required the cooperation of the product value chain participants: manufacturers, supermarket and consumers. Another important fact is the definition of a suitable IT infrastructure on which information could be stored, collected, processed and communicated to consumers. The support of the Food Awareness concept has been accomplished through the steps described below:

A. Supermarket’s side 1) Enable information management system.

As stated above, supermarket must enable an information management system where both customer preferences and product information can be set. This step also includes the interaction with external entities that enrich the information retrieval (e.g.: logo recognition systems, identity management systems, etcetera).

2) Matching information. Develop the logic for matching product information with

customer preferences to guarantee accurate results.

B. Manufacturers’ side 1) Update product info.

By using supermarket web infrastructure, manufacturers can set and update information for their products.

C. Customers’ side (Fig.3) 1) Customer sign up.

Customers navigate to web application URL and sign up to create personalized profiles (set preferences). This step includes the option of signing up as an anonymous user.

2) Scan product. Locate a product at supermarket and scan its identifying

QR code to visualize personalized information based on preferences set previously.

Figure 3. Steps from customers’ side.

IV. PILOT DESCRIPTION In order to implement the pilot with the features and

requirements derived from the previous study it became necessary to use all the potential of the expected Future Internet’s capabilities [2] to improve food awareness among consumers. The Future Internet’s capabilities referred above have provided the pilot with scalability, security, performance and data integration by implementing cloud hosting, bridging of IoT enabled interfaces and services and open interfaces to new services.

The pilot targets all the mechanisms (e.g. applications, infrastructure, data and communication models) that enable consumers to request information of a specific product using their Smartphone before/during and after their shopping process; so they only get the right product attributes of their interest according to their consumer shopping profile. This requires an infrastructure for managing consumer profile data (taking into account security and privacy issues) and for managing product attributes. The pilot is mainly focused on the data management and provision to consumers.

The data provision to the consumer is carried out by two ways:

• Providing tailored product information from selected products that costumers will find in the supermarket.

• Showing hidden information from logos and signs which can be found in some products, usually processed products.

In order to match the consumer's interests, users can create a dynamic consumer profile in order to know what information they are interested in. Hence, the generation of tailored information depends on these profiles so this characteristic allows more accurate information matching in comparison with the generic and fixed information provision of products’ labels.

Having tailored information after a matching process leverages privacy and security issues. As this information is supposed to be managed, in the future, by external entities in the form of Generic Enablers (GE) [12]; consumers, inside the pilot, will be owners of all the tailored data they consume and produce. Consumers can also make use of anonymous profiles in the case they are not interested on permanently sharing their information with the supermarket, the service cloud and GEs behind.

There are two main parts in the pilot that are described in this section. • The client side, which encloses the technological

developments that allow consumers getting tailored information from the supermarket infrastructure using a smartphone (user domain).

• The infrastructure side encloses all the developments being executed in the supermarket domain. As the tailored information generation of this side, is not a stand-alone process, the supermarket domain makes use of a set of GEs that provides some functionalities that will be mentioned in next sections.

485

A. Clients A standard smartphone with updated software can be

used to test the web app pilot. Among standard features to be used are: camera, scanner software and HTML5 enabled web browser. Behind the client side it has been defined a web service based architecture [13], and its corresponding implementation is able to tackle the traditional limitations exposed by typical client approaches where interfaces are tailored to fit specific deployment conditions (varieties of mobile and desktop environments). In this pilot, a web-style client provides service access with a solid and standard-compliant client framework that can be invoked from any user equipment with minimum requirements such as a web browser with HTML5 [3] support.

Since the terminal is the entry point of supermarket’s users; the use of HTML5/Javascript based technologies (through web browsers) directly expands the reachability of users. This is because, there are several mobile operating systems, such as: Android, iOS, Blackberry and so on; so tackling the tailoring information process for every existing mobile Operating System (OS) could be a drawback for the whole process.

B. Infrastructure The infrastructure is in charge of linking product related

information databases with consumer needs, and gives to them in the easiest way the tailored information requested. A key issue is to develop a subsystem that allows collecting and managing dynamic information and data generated at different points of the supply chain. An additional module has been developed in charge of providing the means for the mobile application to retrieve supermarket privacy policy, which describes what information, does supermarket need from the users of the application and the purpose of usage. As in our case, supermarket only requires the information for a single purpose that is, to provide tailored information, and always wants access to the same information; only one privacy policy was created and exposed via module. This application is called from the GUI to obtain the needed information.

The web services layer is developed through an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) which exposes Restful web services in order to be invoked by any application. When a request arrives to the ESB, the message work-flow (MF) analyses and determines from source of the URL that invokes this message. Next, The URL filter determines if that URL is compatible with the existing patterns. Once the URL has passed the filter, it arrives to a router (choice component) that addresses the request to the right service. If there is an error, it is redirected to another message workflow that keeps a log of every request.

A list of features that have been integrated in the pilot is summarized below: • Identity Management GCP GE [14]. Identify

management controls the way users define policies regarding preferences and privacy.

• IaaS Data Center Resource Management [15]. Provides cloud-based services for deploying applications.

• Tailored information system. The information provider retrieves the information regarding products; so even if the matching occurs outside of the domain of the provider, as an example in the supermarket, this building block can work. As an example of this the front layer of the mobile application is decoupled from the database which stores product data.

• Integration of a logo recognition tool. Logo recognition functionality is provided by a service developed by another partner from Smart Agri-Food project and is focused on identifying logos on products and providing consumers with descriptive information.

• Front-end. Implemented using fully HTML5/Javascript codes which allow users to make use of the application by using the web browser available on their smartphones (no need of additional plug-ins), and define which internal capabilities, such as cameras, will be available through the whole shopping process.

• Integration of fTRACE pilot. The fTRACE pilot[1] is about tracking, tracing and awareness of meat products.

These features together form a M2M communication

[17] environment since they integrate devices and heterogonous back-end systems into one (Future Supermarket) service platform (Fig. 4). The web pilot has been hosted on a FI-WARE cloud hosting enabler service and its services tested at Bonpreu supermarket facilities located in Barcelona (Spain). Bonpreu is a medium size store composed by a dry products section, a bakery and a big fresh food area with fresh fruit and vegetables, a butcher and fish/seafood services. The main client profile of this shop is middle-aged middle-high class consumers, according to the neighborhood profile.

Figure 4. Pilot implementation

The premises include a Consumers’ Space which is used for consumer-retailer interaction in order to have feedback from its regular consumers. It has been chosen as the best site for pilot deployment because of the following reasons:

The medium size of the supermarkets represents the best conditions for a prototype test.

-The location of the supermarket and the Consumers’ space is in a young and dynamic neighborhood, so is the profile of its clients. Young and dynamic consumers are more likely to be used and interested in new technologies. Therefore, the panel of consumers consisting of clients of the

486

supermarket will be easy to create and be involved in the project.

-The deployment of all equipment needed for TIC pilot can be set up in the Consumers’ space, which provides enough room for it.

-The Consumers’ space represents a perfect place for developing TIC pilot tests in a closed and controlled environment, using pilot products from the supermarket and totally equipped for the development of the workshops with consumers.

V. CONSUMER OPINION Real consumers were selected to both define pilot

features and test the pilot itself and assess their satisfaction with the implementation. Feedback from end users (consumers) is a key point to assess viability and compliance with their expectations. For this, several sessions were planned in order to involve consumers in the pilot. The sessions are called workshops with consumers, because of their interactive and open to discussion nature between consumers and retailer.

The objective of these workshops was to involve a panel of 15-20 consumers in all the process of the pilot, its conception, development and evaluation, as to identify their needs and requirements as consumers, then to test and to validate the TIC app mock-ups and the final TIC app.

The results of the workshops helped to assure the feasibility of an open deployment of the TIC pilot in a Bonpreu supermarket. The development of all workshops with consumers in a closed environment allowed detecting and improving the TIC app in order to make the decision for an open deployment in a real supermarket assuring the viability of it.

The workshops have been defined aiming the next objectives: • Pre-workshop. To know the opinion of consumers about

the future supermarket and way of consumption. • 1st workshop. Introduction to the project, analysis of the

current situation (jungle of logos, lack of information) and stipulation of which product attributes consumer would like to know and how while shopping

• 2nd workshop. Experimentation with the first release of the TIC app at supermarket premises to validate the technology and to improve it according to panel of consumers’ proposals.

• 3rd workshop. Experimentation with the second release of the TIC app at supermarket premises for a final validation and to get the feedback of expectative of the panel.

As a result of the pre-workshop and first workshop, the

attributes that consumers consider as more interesting and are willing to be informed about while shopping are depicted in figure 5.

Figure 5. Results on product attributes interest.

Regarding the ways of getting product information that consumers find more interesting and would like to use while shopping, it points out that consumers want to get the information through a new technology device like a screen, a scanner or a Smartphone. The Smartphone is a mix of screen and scanner.

For the 2nd workshop, a variety of products were used for the experimentation, having each product its unique QR code. The process was quite simple: consumers needed to connect to supermarket’s Wi-Fi network and to get access to the online app using an URL, select the language, then register to create their own consumer profile by filling in a short questionnaire about their preferences (“I am interested in: food origin, sustainability aspects, chemical content, allergens, animal welfare, etc.”), afterwards scanning the QR code to get the product information that fits with their consumer profile and finally the application showed the tailored information of that product.

The 3rd workshop was performed in two parts: (1) presentation of the TIC app (summary of its functionalities), (2) test with the TIC app using the Smartphone of each participant. Instructions on how to proceed with the test were explained. The Web app was valued by the consumers with an average score of 7.2/10.

Starting from 2nd workshop and through 3rd one, consumers were able to test two iterations of the TIC Web app. The first test allowed detecting some problems and improvements that were corrected for the second test. New functionalities were included to be tested in the 3rd workshop. Figure 6 compares the technical evaluation of the pilot for each functionality.

Figure 6. Comparison between 1st and 2nd evaluation.

487

A global evaluation of the TIC Web app regarding conceptual value for consumers was done. Figure 7 shows the results of the two tests with consumers.

Figure 7. Satisfaction comparison between 1st and 2nd evaluation.

As a conclusion, we can say that consumers participating in the process for pilot evaluation were very interested and motivated in the TIC pilot and are willing to use the Web app. Percentage of consumers that would use the web app while shopping grew up from an initial 57% after the first test to 70% after the second test, showing a substantial increase in appreciation.

With the workshops outputs in mind, a solid architecture has been defined to support the next generic features:

• Accurate, since it retrieves data from reliable sources located at cloud hosting.

• Granulated, since it filters information based on user preferences and profiled with the interaction of Generic Enablers (GE)

• Advanced information, since it has been designed to include new information items and, most importantly, serve as a communication link in order to inform customers in the case of contingencies related to: health, logistics and so on.

VI. CONCLUSIONS As a result of the interpretation of consumer’s opinions

mentioned above, we conclude that the implementation of an information system for a Future Supermarket can be radically boosted by using information & decision support systems that are tightly integrated with advanced internet-based networks & services such as those provided by the IoT and M2M paradigms.

The successful integration of these architectures provides current supermarkets with the intelligence, efficiency and performance required in order to meet the ever changing customer expectations and to turn supermarket services into Future Supermarket services.

Feedbacks obtained from workshops with consumers have helped us to define new requirements and outline the architecture needed. New needs (Augmented Reality, smart payment, smart logistics and notifications) will be tackled in the next phase of the SmartAgrifood project.

A test pilot has been developed to demonstrate how the use of the potential of Future Internet capabilities can improve food awareness among consumers by using a smartphone and scanning a QR code or entering id code of

products which simplifies the RFID interaction exposed at [7]. Cloud oriented definition of the architecture and use of HTML5 eases the addition of new functionalities.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work is part of the Smart Agri-Food project [1]

which has been funded by the EU 7th Framework Programme and whose activities are carried out within the scope of FI-PPP [2] and is also supported by project CALISTA TEC2012-32457. The authors would like to thank all the project partners for their valuable contributions to the project itself which are inherently reflected in the paper.

REFERENCES

[1] Smart Agri-Food Project. http://www.smartagrifood.eu [2] Future Internet Public-Private Partnership (FI-PPP) Program.

http://www.fi-ppp.eu [3] HTML5 Reference page [online]: Retrieved from:

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/single-page.html [4] SmartShopping cart. http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/thinking-tech/

shopping-cart-helps-consumers-make-smarter-food-choices/11403 [5] FI-WARE project. [online]. Retrieved from http://www.fi-ware.eu/ [6] A. Jara., M. Parra and A. Skarmeta, “Marketing 4.0: A new value

added to the Marketing through the Internet of Things”, 2012 Sixth International Conference on Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing

[7] F. Villanueva, D. Villa, F. Moya, M. Santofimia, J. Lopez, “Internet of Things architecture for a RFID-based product tracking business model”, 2012 Sixth International Conference on Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing.

[8] FI-PPP SmartAgriFood Project, Deliverable D400.3, “Smart Food Awareness Report on Val-idation activities and Detailed Specification Revision”

[9] C.K Prahalad, V. Ramaswamy, "Co-Opting Customer Experience". Harvard Business Review, 2000.

[10] H. Chesbrough. “Open Innovation: The new imperative for creating and profiting from technology”. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. ISBN 978-1578518371, 2003

[11] GS1 EPC Global, “EPC Information Services (EPCIS) Specification”, 2007. http://www.gs1.org/gsmp/kc/epcglobal/epcis/ epcis_1_0_1-standard-20070921.pdf

[12] FI-WARE Project, Generic Enablers, http://catalogue.fi-ware.eu/enablers

[13] T. Robles, S. González-Miranda, R. Alcarria and A. Morales, “Web browser HTML5 enabled for FI services”. Lecture Notes in Computer Science Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence, 2012, pp. 181-184.

[14] Identify Management GE. http://catalogue.fi-ware.eu/enablers/identity-management-gcp

[15] IaaS: Data Center Resource Management. http://catalogue.fi-ware.eu/enablers/identity-management-gcp

[16] R. Belk, G. Ger and S. Askegaard, ‘The Missing Streetcar Named Desire’ in S. Ratneshwar, D. Mick and C. Huffman, (Eds.): ‘The Why of Consumption’ (Routledge, 2000), pp. 98-119

[17] M. Castro, A. Jara, and A. Skarmeta “An analysis of M2M platforms: challenges and opportunities for the Internet of Things”, 2012 Sixth International Conference on Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing

488