SELFLY STORE
New technology enables 24/7 fresh foodservices at workplaces
I
t comes as no shock that a lack of healthy and available food and nutrition at workplaces can adversely affect how people perform. On the other hand, the International Labour Organisation suggests that productivity gains of up to 20% can be achieved with adequate workplace nutrition. The Finnish intelligent vending company, Selfly Store, believes there is a gap to be filled when speaking of workplace foodservices. Post COVID, many workplaces have struggled to attract employees back to office environments. Moreover, predicting the number of employees who will be physically present at the workplace on a single day can be challenging. In addition to this, many companies testify that employees have busy work schedules and consequently limited patience with crowded canteens and long distances to lunch restaurants. In other workplaces, for example, hospitals and factories, employees work in shifts, while food services are limited to the lunch hours. The latter is also related to employees rarely finding quick snacks and access to healthy energy sources throughout the day, outside of lunch hours. “While workplaces struggle to keep employees engaged and productive, we can see a clear shift in consumer trends. People in general want access to fresh and healthy energy sources, and not only
during peak-hours. In the data that we have from Selfly Store intelligent cabinets in 21 European countries, we clearly see that the food sales in workplaces are done throughout the day. Over 50% of the sales are done outside of the lunch hours,” says Aslak de Silva, CEO of Selfly Store. Throughout Europe, Selfly Store cabinets
are used to create spaces, where employees can serve themselves efficiently, close to where they are located, and on a 24/7 schedule. People simply authenticate themselves with a card or digital wallet, open the cabinet door, and grab whatever they want. All items can be physically inspected by the consumer, and once the cabinet door closes, the consumer is automatically charged. The technology behind is RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), where unique information about each product is encoded on RFID tags. “If we were to compare workplace foodservices with grocery shopping, I believe there is a clear gap. For groceries we have a lot of options; large supermarkets in the outskirts of towns, smaller stores close by, like 7-Eleven, and lastly also home- delivery options. For workplaces we have options to go to regular restaurants, or canteens, and then the rarity of to-office- delivery. Here is the gap. In a similar way that we have close by 7-Elevens, why don’t
we see more of these alternatives for workplace food? Call it micro restaurants, which are close by. I strongly believe many workplaces and employees would benefit greatly from close by micro restaurants with self service,” Aslak continues.
DATA HELPS IN EVERYTHING One foodservice business which has leveraged this gap to their advantage is a young Swiss company, Noury AG. They are disrupting the workplace foodservices market by using data from Selfly Store’s cabinets to individualise the food offering to each of their clients. “Data is the key to give the best food
offering to our clients and consumers. It allows us to remotely understand what products are in demand and when. We can schedule the replenishment to the right times and days based on analytics. Moreover, the RFID technology and data are also the keys to avoid food waste. From the data we’re able to see when individual items are expiring and put in place automatic discounts or combo deals to eliminate the waste,” says Lena Schüpbach, co-founder of Noury AG. Expiry date management is crucial to
provide fresh food sales and avoid food waste. The advantage of building the expiry date capabilities into the technology is that the manual labour of searching for expiring items and discounting them can be eliminated. If current fresh and healthy food trends persist, it’s very likely that we will see an increasing number of solutions with this technology in the future, both in workplaces and outside. Read more on our website https://www.
selflystore.com/ and LinkedIn https://
www.linkedin.com/company/selfly-store and our CEO’s contact details: Aslak de Silva,
aslak.desilva@
selflystore.com.
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