Future Supermarket: Overcoming Food Awareness Challenges

Abstract

As consumers' preferences evolve and product information grows in complexity, it becomes more difficult both for supermarkets to provide useful information describing products and for customers to select the most appropriate product based on social, ideological or particular preferences. Current shopping environments lack of specific tools for using customer profiles to provide them with information that really want to know (ecological, gluten free, etc.) about products. An IoT-leveraged information system is the perfect choice for filling the existing gap in the services for a Future Supermarket. This paper describes work done by implementing a methodology to involve customers in the development of a web pilot that contributes to the support of the Food Awareness concept by linking product information with consumer preferences deriving into faster product selection and speeding up purchase process. The web pilot developed is comprised of cloud-hosted interacting modules which fulfill requirements of customers. An analysis of user evaluation of web pilot is also presented.