Russian food retailer fights food waste with Israeli startup

The Green Dot project will be used for 300 products in the X5 Smart Kitchen offering of ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook foods, delivered to 460 supermarkets across Central Russia. The solution enables independent monitoring of product quality and storage conditions both by Perekrestok employees and customers, with sensors indicating the actual temperature conditions experienced by each item and their compliance with storage requirements.

This is a joint project with the foodtech startup Evigence Sensors, one of four winners of X5’s innovation scouting project held in July 2019 in Israel. Perekrestok has the exclusive right to use Evigence sensors in Russia.

Each sensor is specially engineered to correspond to the time-temperature effects for the food it is designed for. The sensor changes colour if the shelf life is about to expire or in case of non-compliance with storage conditions. Before labelling, the sensor’s chemical compound is activated using special equipment. If storage, transportation or in-store temperatures go above a set threshold, the product’s actual shelf life will expire faster than indicated on the packaging date code – and the Green Dot label will show it.

Perekrestok has already completed the first pilot stage, which included checking the technical characteristics, performing sensor tests in different temperatures, reviewing the entire cold chain and evaluating the level of potential write-offs of expired products under the sensor system, which proved to be low. Together with the developers, the Perekrestok team has ensured that the sensor equipment can be smoothly incorporated into the production processes of X5’s Smart Kitchen offering.

Visual Freshness Sensors will help to increase customer confidence in Smart Kitchen products and boost NPS for X5’s ready-to-eat product offering. Customers will be able to independently monitor a product’s shelf life and make sure that the storage and transportation conditions were fully in line with the highest standards.

“Perekrestok customers can always rely on high product quality, and we introduce innovations to improve that even further. The Green Dot will create a new level of transparency for our customers, as well as ensure a higher level of control for our cold chain and storage conditions. Moreover, the solution will improve our store operations, giving employees an additional tool to control freshness and select products to be written off. Innovations help us to enhance our services, create a more comfortable shopping experience and boost customer loyalty,” said Dmitry Medvedev, Commercial Director of Perekrestok.

“We are proud and excited to partner with Perekrestok to introduce innovative new concepts in food quality and freshness. Evigence sensors optimize the shelf life of products with a predesigned smart sensor attached to the products. The colour of the sensor, which changes based on temperature exposure over time, indicates the current freshness level of the product to the consumer and store associate alike. In this way, we help customers to shop more wisely while maintaining the quality of the products on offer,” said Danny Hacohen, Head of Business Development at Evigence Sensors.

Evigence Sensors is developed to redefine how the shelf life of perishable products is monitored through its innovative lineup of small, low-cost sensors. Powering smart consumption, its Visual Freshness Sensors offer brands, retailers and consumers a new way to monitor freshness in real time to ensure that products are consumed at their optimal quality while decreasing waste.

X5’s Smart Kitchen is Russia’s largest food-to-go facility catering to the chain’s supermarkets. It produces and supplies ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook foods to over 460 Perekrestok supermarkets, more than 2,700 Pyaterochka proximity stores, and 30 Karusel hypermarkets in Moscow and the Moscow region.