Ireland’s leading food retail, wholesale and foodservice company, Musgrave, has rolled out an ESL (Electronic Shelf Label) solution from Pricer, the world’s most reliable provider of ESLs, across its SuperValu and Centra stores in Northern Ireland as its looks to digitally transform its store estate.
With a 145-year heritage in food and brand innovation, Musgrave is one of Europe’s largest family-owned grocery businesses, with its network of brands, including SuperValu, Centra, Frank and Honest and Musgrave MarketPlace, extending to 1,400 stores across Ireland and Spain. Employing 41,000 staff, its combined total retail sales is now in excess of €5.4 billion. Built on the philosophy of ‘building good business’ the grocery retailer puts creating a sustainable, profitable business that benefits shareholders, staff, partners and communities at the centre of its operations, working relentlessly to innovate and lead the way in the food retail sector.
As part of this innovation roadmap, Musgrave has digitalised its stores with ESL capabilities using a solution from Pricer, which will allow the grocer to enhance store efficiency and customer experience (CX), whilst also contributing to its sustainability goals.
Implementing the solution with local partner and ePoS specialist, Unipos, across its SuperValu and Centra stores, the ESLs enable Musgrave to centralise pricing and promotions, allowing it to be updated digitally and in-real time, to ensure pricing accuracy.
As well as delivering operational efficiencies as store staff no longer have to spend considerable time manually replacing paper-labels, allowing them to redirect their efforts to customer-service focused activities that add value to shoppers’ buying journeys, it is also contributing towards Musgrave’s sustainability goals by reducing paper consumption associated with traditional labels.
“We needed a pricing automation solution which could dynamically and quickly modify prices in our stores in a synchronised way, while enabling us to be more sustainable with our in-store operations,” Michael Devlin, Head of IT at Musgrave Northern Ireland, commented. “By automating the pricing process, crucial time is freed up to work on value-adding activities, such as merchandising, replenishing stock and assisting shoppers, along with improving staff satisfaction as more time is spent on the shop floor rather than in the back office for price and promotional changeovers. As the prices are updated instantly, ensuring that the price displayed on the shelf is always the same as at the till point, we can further increase customer satisfaction and confidence.”
“Sustainability is a key driver for us in all decisions we make. Through the rollout of ESLs and the removal of traditional paper labels, we will see a definitive improvement in our paper consumption. We will continue to monitor the reduction in paper balanced against the energy consumed using this system, however as Pricer ESLs are based on an extremely power efficient technology with market-leading battery life, we are in no doubt we will see a net sustainable benefit from ESLs.”
Trevor Magill, Managing Director for Musgrave Northern Ireland
Customer experience is also being further enhanced at the shelf-edge through the ESL solution, with digital signage allowing promotions, offers and information about the products to be brought to life through imagery, information and animations to better meet shoppers’ digitally-driven demands. Indeed, original research of over 2,000 UK shoppers in Pricer’s latest ‘Pricer UK Consumer Insight Report 2021’ showed that two thirds (65%) would be more likely to buy a product in-store when they can easily and clearly access information about the product digitally. Six in ten (57%) consumers say they like to have more access to product details in addition to pricing, whilst nearly half (49%) would like more digital signage at the shelf-edge to help inform their buying decisions.
Musgraves’ Devlin continued: “The Pricer labels come in various shapes and sizes which meet the needs across our different store formats, along with the ability to display images and animations, which help to create appealing promotions for our customers that go beyond the standard paper labels. Our market leading brands are successful because they meet the changing needs of today’s shoppers. From a customer perspective, it is vitally important to have pricing that is firstly accurate, and secondly that is easy to read and captivating, which will encourage repeat custom via a seamless and digital in-store customer journey. With Pricer we get a robust, scalable and future-proof platform which we can rely on for years to come.”
Duncan Potter, CMO at Pricer, commented:
“Future-forward retailers like Musgrave understand that shoppers’ needs are now evolving to become increasingly digital-first. Customers want engaging, immersive experiences delivered digitally at the shelf-edge to enhance their in-store buying journeys. With the implementation of ESLs, not only can Musgrave meet these evolving shopper needs, but it can also improve operational efficiencies in-store, deliver more rewarding experiences for its employees, as well as reducing its carbon footprint by cutting out the unnecessary use of paper labels.”
