Close to 1,000 retail tech companies from all over the world descended on the NRF Big Show in New York this week, showcasing innovations in every aspect in retail. Here is Retail Week’s round-up of just a few pieces of technology that could make an impact.

Infinite Acres

Infinite Acres, the vertical farming joint venture between Ocado, 80 Acres Farm and Priva Holding, took a stand pride of place on the innovation lab floor at the NRF Big Show.

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On display, alongside heaping baskets of vertically farmed tomatoes and cucumbers, were three racks of the venture’s indoor farm technology – showcasing indoor-grown leafy greens bathed in soft purple light.

Chief executive Tisha Livingston said that since the joint venture was signed in September, Infinite Acres has been in the process of building its first functioning vertical farm in Ohio. She said the first commercial crop of vegetables would be grown and ready to distribute in the second half of this year.

Once that first crop has been delivered, she said she expects new grocery clients to be lining up.

“Once the first farm is up and running, it’s an exponential thing. Once producers and companies see that we can scale this technology and deliver commercial quantities of leafy greens and vegetables, we think demand is only going to grow.”

Bossa Nova

Retail robotics firm Bossa Nova was at the NRF in force, showcasing its newest, next generation 2020 technology robots.

The firm, which announced that its robots will be rolled out in 1,000 Walmart stores over the course of this year, is touting its next-gen technology as being “slimmer” in profile so as to make its technology compatible with smaller format stores.

The robots can also scan all categories – from fresh and frozen foods through to apparel – and are powered by Bossa Nova’s improved artificial intelligence stacking engine.

The robots also have panoramic cameras for improved data capture to deliver more accurate data for retailers.

Shelf-scanning technology such as this has become something of a theme in retail robotics if the expo floor at NRF was anything to go by – with similar displays from other robotics firms including Badger Technologies and Savioke.

Bossa Nova’s chief executive Sarjoun Skaff, speaking at the Big Show yesterday, said retailers like Walmart are embracing robots as a way of solving age-old stocking issues.

“Instead of spending time on your schedule looking for problems, you can start fixing them. You become data-driven,” he said. “Now, when the [work] shift shows up they already know what problems need to be solved.”

Toshiba

As customers continue to demand quicker and more seamless shopping experiences, so Japanese conglomerate Toshiba has entered the frictionless store format fray.

Its ‘Frictionless Store’ features multi-layered smart shelf technology and real-time computing to track customers as they shop. The store also utilises what it calls “store-to-cloud connected commerce”.

Toshiba said the new concept store was a glimpse into how “retailers may evolve towards the store of the future at their own pace while solving immediate business challenges like item recognition at self-checkout”.

At the NRF Big Show, Toshiba has also demonstrated its new Proactive Availability Services – an AI- and analytics-powered service that can help retailers manage everything from availabilities to service performance at the back end.

Samsung

South Korean telecoms giant Samsung had a heavy presence at the NRF Big Show in 2020, showcasing a suite of innovations from bricks-and-mortar retailers.

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Perhaps most eye-catching of all the innovations was Samsung’s monolithic QLED ‘The Wall’ store signage display, which showcases moving images in 8k picture quality. The display technology can effectively be scaled to an almost infinite size as it is made up of individual modules that fit together.

Unsurprisingly for a company best known for producing mobile phones, Samsung said that its new store signage technology is effectively smart in the same way – retail clients can run apps on the signs and can use out-of-the-box AI to track customer reaction to promotions and campaigns.

The company also showcased a number of mobile products for store assistants – such as its Galaxy XCover and Tab Active tablets.