East of England Co-op ramps up ESL for sustainability

East of England Co-op has extended its partnership with Retail Insight, provider of in-store execution software, for a further three years as part of its ongoing commitment to sustainability and tackling food waste.

East of England Co-op has partnered with Retail Insight since 2021, leveraging its cloud-based WasteInsight solution to tackle food waste across its estate, putting retailers in control of food waste through data-led, actionable insights including forecasting accuracy, expiration management, dynamic markdowns and donations to charities.

East of England Co-op leverages WasteInsight to drive better expiration management and smarter markdowns using the Prompted and Dynamic Markdown features within the solution. Close collaboration means that its team works with Retail Insight to implement algorithm changes to optimise the time between each markdown, reducing the burden on store associates improving labour productivity.

Retail Insight has integrated East of England Co-op’s electronic shelf-edge labels (ESLs) into WasteInsight to drive up labour productivity. The WasteInsight solution pushes alerts to store associates’ hand-held devices, notifying them of any near-expiry items that need discounting. The hand-held device then provides an option for store-associates to force the ESL for the product in question to flash, making it easier and quicker for them to identify, implement and process markdowns.

Following a successful pilot, East of England Co-op has now rolled out the solution in 18 stores and plans to go live in all of its ESL-equipped food stores by September of this year.

“We are thrilled to have successfully piloted the integration between our ESLs and Retail Insight’s Prompted Markdown solution,” said Robert Hawkins, Senior Project Manager at East of England Co-op. “As we roll out across our estate, we are confident that we will continue to reap the rewards of streamlined processes, and we are excited to get feedback from our store colleagues.”

Kieran O’Brien, UK Client Director at Retail Insight, commented: “The work we are doing with ESL integrations across the East of England Co-op estate will ensure that we can drastically reduce the amount of time store associates spend looking for products to be marked down … our solution works with retailers’ foundational data and is product agnostic, it can work with any ESL model and can be fully scalable across a retailer’s estate.”