Italian food retailer Unicoop Firenze, part of Coop Italia, has selected French firm SES-Imagotag to digitise its stores.

SES-Imagotag specialises in digital options for physical commerce. Unicoop Firenze, based in Tuscany, operates one of the largest supermarket chains in Italy. It has selected the Vusion IoT cloud platform for the digitisation of 110 stores.

Unicoop Firenze’s adoption of the Vusion IoT cloud platform is driven by several external factors and internal requirements impacting its operations, such as inflation, supply chain efficiency and satisfactory shelf-planning compliance. The company identified the need to address market dynamics and shifting demands quickly, to have the capacity for greater real-time pricing agility, and to be aligned with the growth of ecommerce.

The retailer picked Vusion tools to monitor shelves centrally for product availability and ensure price synchronisation across all channels.

SES-Imagotag has so far rolled out cloud-connected Vusion electronic shelf labels across 40 of Unicoop Firenze’s stores and will complete the deployment across the remaining 70, which range in size from large supermarkets to smaller mini-markets, by September. Unicoop Firenze has also already installed Captana, a computer-vision-based tool for on-shelf availability monitoring and management, in several stores.

“We selected SES-Imagotag for their leading presence in Italy and in such a dynamic market,” said Riccardo Rapi, chief information officer at Unicoop Firenze. “With this deployment, we continue to accelerate our digital transformation with the Vusion platform, which make our daily in-store operations more efficient. This partnership allows us also to transform our stores into high value digital assets, while creating a human-centric shopping experience.”

Sébastien Fourcy, senior executive vice president at SES-Imagotag, added: “We are delighted and grateful to be partnering with Unicoop Firenze for the digitisation of their stores, transforming the way they operate as retailers. Italy is a major European market for our group and, thanks to Unicoop, we are strengthening our leading position here, which is key to meet our Vusion 27 strategic plan objectives.”

And Alessio Gruffé, vice president at SES-Imagotag, said: “We are proud of the outstanding development we made in Italy and our leading position in this market, further strengthened by this new roll-out. Now, more than ever, the Vusion platform can truly empower store managers with the ability to run their locations with greater dexterity and focus on profitability-driving elements such as pricing agility, eliminating shelf out-of-stocks, using data analytics for more effective shelf and category management, as well as engaging with consumers at the shelf, where purchasing decisions are made.”