According to Progressive Grocer, Swedish AI powered salad bar.

Five words I never thought I would ever hear myself saying out loud.

Swedish AI powered salad bar company Piccadilly and Digimart Corp.

A global provider of digital watermarking technologies, have revealed a strategic partnership to address the increasing problem of retail shrink and food fraud in the fresh and prepared food categories.

The partnership integrates digimark's advanced digital watermarks into Piccadilly's branded packaging, enabling retailers to implement secure automated product verification and ensure pricing accuracy at self checkout.

These invisible digital watermarks are embedded throughout Piccadilly's packaging for protection that's resistant to tampering and ensures that product information remains intact during the self checkout process, thereby helping retailers reduce price lookup fraud at self checkout.

And this is our second Digimark sighting this year in the OmniTalk Retail Fast 5.

Are you buying or selling invisible barcodes on your salad containers?

My gosh, I am buying and buying and buying this over and over again for a couple of reasons.

One, we've heard from grocers who are using this technology right now with the Piccadilly invisible barcodes and they used to experience tons of theft because they would have people putting different things in these to go salad containers and they wouldn't know what was in there.

And now when they're checking out, they're able to use the lookup code right away to know that that's a salad container or takeout container.

It should not weigh the weight of a, let's say, couple of steaks example.

Yeah, right.

And so it gives that indicator to the self checkout machine that or the checkout cashier that there's something that's not right about these things.

But second of all, Chris, I, as somebody who frequents salad bars very often.

In grocery stores, you are a salad bar aficionado.

I am.

And as, and when we know that, you know, grab and go food, like what you can get from the Piccadilly station is something that we're going to see continue to increase both in grocery stores and in C store formats.

This is just a very simple way for me to just go put my thing on the table and get out of there, which is the point of grab and go food.

And this hasn't been something that you can do in a self serve environment like this.

So I think this is brilliant.

I think we're going to see a lot more of it.

But how, how do you feel?

Are you buying or selling?

Yes.

No, I'm buying it.

I'm Buying it too.

I think it's really interesting.

I didn't even know about the weight correlation thing that you talk, you talked about like I was just thinking about used for unintentional and intentional theft.

I also like the consumer side of it too because whenever I go and get something from the salad bar, want to go through self checkout, I'm never exactly sure how to pay for it.

So if I can just place it there and it knows that's great, like it helps me out.

I don't have to figure it all out.

I actually had to have somebody help me with this just the other day.

Like I had a container, I'm like, I don't know what to do.

Can you, can you come over and help me do it?

So.

And at the end of the day, like it saves the retailer more money.

It potentially helps to make more money too.

So like, you know, especially in the grocery industry and I'm all for that whenever, whenever those variables at play.

So I think this is great.

And not only that, but digimarc has a ton of other, you know, I think use cases that haven't even been explored yet.

Particularly when you start talking about backroom operations and finding products quicker and faster throughout a store.

Like, I don't know, there's a lot to like here.

I just, I'm curious to see, you know, where does it continue to expand from here on out.

Yeah, because before we were talking about this with like Walmart's brands, like embedding these into packaging when you're the manufacturer.

Right.

So I think like you said, like there's so many uses for this that I think we're going to start to see come become more common as their use cases and efficiencies increase for grocers who are, or other retailers and brands who are investing in the technology.

So yeah, the great thing about Piccadilly is it's very easy to implement there.

Right.

But when you start talking about getting all the other brands to label your products throughout a store like this, then it becomes challenging.

So.

But yes, but there could be a use case there in the long run.