While coffee service and vending — the longtime pillars of the convenience services industry — were not typically associated with progressive technology, the introduction and acceptance of micro markets in the last decade has certainly altered the industry’s image. As it turns out, micro markets are just the tip of the technology iceberg.
Mac Bolak, founder of Panoptyc, said the technology acceleration in the post-pandemic world was inevitable. “There are so many smart people and researchers experimenting with different technologies and obviously, LLM [Large Language Model], the new AI cutting edge that has changed the game recently, I think once you bring all of this data together and you bring the smartest people together, we're going to continue to get better at an accelerating rate with AI, which is really exciting for our industry,” said Bolak.
Theft-mitigation technologies
Panoptyc provides theft-mitigation technology driven by AI. Bridger Keally, the company’s sales director, said operators come to Panoptyc for different reasons. “The most prominent issue is that they're struggling with theft, obviously. When you've got a self-checkout, it's an inherent risk. And we've seen the industry average at around 6% across the board recently, and it's obviously tough seeing that profit slip away,” Keally said. “Second reason is labor. The operators are super busy working on growing their business, managing accounts, all that stuff, and it's frustrating when they have people sitting and reviewing footage for hours, managing shrink, instead of working on growing the business.”
Pro Watch Solutions launched its theft-mitigation product, ARMS, at the NAMA show in Dallas. “We are using surveillance video and applying AI and other analytics to identify theft and other lost sales opportunities. We are providing that to the operator in an easy-to-use and actionable format, allowing for good conversations with their customers,” said Mark Kronenberg, founder of Pro Watch Solutions about its automated retail management system. “Our vision is to have controls for theft and to capture lost sales opportunities for micro market operators, increasing their profits.”
Promotion via micro market displays
Advana, a 365 Retail Markets company, sends advertising and promotional messages to more than 15,000 screens in micro markets across the United States. “Advana is a consumer engagement opportunity for an operator, and the side benefit of that: it is revenue generating,” said Jacob McNulty, chief customer officer with 365 Retail Markets. Advertisers want access to the workplace demographic and are willing to pay for it, McNulty noted.
Operators are compensated on different levels. One level involves general advertising and is not related to the micro market itself. Another level involves product launches and working directly with specific consumer packaged brands. Installing additional digital signage also can increase revenue.
Another promotion opportunity that Advana can facilitate is developing a communications package between the operator’s client and their employees, promoting employee wellness programs or other important messages. McNulty said that the amount of money an operator receives each month varies, depending on the promotional level, the location and other factors that can be important to advertisers.
This summer, Cantaloupe Inc. will launch the Cantaloupe Advantage Program, an advertising and consumer engagement program. “We are really excited about Cantaloupe Advantage, a digital advertising program, where we leverage the footprint of not only our micro market kiosks, but also our engaged devices, which are card readers that have digital touchscreens on them for vending operators,” said Elyssa Steiner, chief marketing officer. “It is about ad space and ad revenue. What we want to do is make it as easy as possible for the operator to sign up and then for us to just create, manage and deploy it for them.”
Pre-kitting
Pre-kitting — the process of preparing in advance the products necessary to service locations — has been around for quite some time, of course. Improved technology has accelerated its use and made it increasingly accessible to operators.
“Lightspeed Fast Track is the pre-kitting technology that we offer for an operator’s warehouse, and they were a fantastic company for a long time before they joined the 365 family,” said Ryan McWhirter, vice president of product development at 365 Retail Markets. “Since then, we've been able to integrate them even more deeply into our back office and of course our VMS.”
Although Lightspeed has been on the market for 10 years, many operators still haven't tried it. “When they see it in action, and they see the amount of labor, time savings and accuracy improvement that comes with it, they wonder why they hadn't been using this all along,” McWhirter said.
Cantaloupe’s Steiner acknowledged that pre-kitting solutions have been centered around one supplier in the past. “Our goal is to be a one-stop shop for operators, so I'm really excited about our warehouse picking solution, Seed Pick Easy. We showcased this at the NAMA show. We now have some operators actively using it, and we're adding new implementations every week,” Steiner said. “It was built as a mobile-first kind of strategy around warehouse picking. We really look to leverage the way they have their warehouse organized to build the mobile picking solution around the operator’s current warehouse, so there's very little change they need to make,” she added.
Integrating multiple technology
As technology advances, integrating a vending management system (VMS) from a company that is not associated with a specific piece of new hardware such as a smart cooler would seem to be a potential challenge. Evan Jarecki, co-founder of Gimme, said his company has solutions.
“Our tools provide a suite of software to help operators of any size and we do provide all of the core functionality that an operator needs — micro markets, vending, delivery, reporting, all that they would need to run their business. We provide integrations with the major hardware providers — that's on the cashless side, like kiosks and pre-kitting hardware,” he said. “We also have software for the additional functions like online OCS ordering or enterprise-level reporting with some of the groups that are out there. Gimme VMS is the brains of the operation — the arms and the legs plug in together. As far as integration with the major providers, 365 and others, as these companies build tools like smart coolers, a Pico, on their existing platforms, the integrations are available right away to operators through VDI integrations,” he added.
Pete Carmain, vice president of enterprise sales for Nayax, said he has an increasing number of conversations about integration each week. “We always look at any project as a payments facilitator. So, we may not be making machines, but we want to be involved in the payments and the data that comes out of that,” he said. “If we can get a payment on a machine and we can get data sent to where it needs to be, that's where we as a company want to be. We develop solutions that make our payment solution integrate with a machine. That's what we pride ourselves on. If there's a machine that needs cashless payment on it, we're going to design something that fits.”
