Revealed at the Future Food District Expo 2015 in Milan, Coop Italia’s vision of tomorrow really lives up to the claim.

‘Store of the future’ is a term that is almost as tired as the words ‘experience’, ‘heritage’ and ‘curation’ when used in a retail context. Yet visitors to the 2015 Expo in Milan, which has just opened, can take a look at the “Future Food District”, a store of the future that really does look like a snapshot of things that may be to come.

The ‘shop’ is the work of the Italian Coop, working with Turin-based Carlo Ratti, a professor at MIT, of architectural practice Carlo Ratti Associates. The store itself functions like any other insofar as visitors can enter, browse and buy products. The difference is that the 1500 products on display are all underneath digital mirrors that provide information about provenance, ingredients and suchlike.

Whether shoppers really want to know this kind of thing or whether they just want to get in and get out of a supermarket, is a moot point, but it is hard not to admire both execution and the intent that underpins this particular store of the future.