Squeeze the avocado
Physicality, design and the future of food shopping
This article was written during my Masters of Advanced Studies in Design Research for Digital Innovation at EPFL+ECAL Lab.
Way back when
Shopping for groceries was once an unavoidably time-consuming and labour-intensive task. It was a chore that took you around multiple specialist shops and market stalls asking shopkeepers to fetch, wrap and weigh your goods for you. The selection was small, the process required effort, but, to most people, it was a normal and social part of everyday life.
The advent of the supermarket in the first half of the 20th century disrupted all this. Selling on a large scale brought down prices, and with everything in one place, convenience and choice took centre stage. The newcomer was an immediate hit with the public, with swathes of people trying, and soon accepting, this modern way of life.
But, in addition to simplicity and selection, perhaps the most interesting novelty was the physically that supermarkets introduced. People could touch, smell and pick out products with their own hands, without the assistance of a shopkeeper. This created a totally new relationship between the consumer and the vendor where the contest for the customer’s attention was no longer won through personal interactions, but through design.
Success by design
Since the beginning, design has been integral to the success of the supermarket. And, though style and environments may vary, all supermarkets use certain spatial, visual and experience design techniques to influence our attention and decision making.
Take the supermarket entrance. As soon as you step foot inside, you are confronted with a wealth of vibrant colours and textures in the fresh produce section. Fruits and vegetables are there to be picked up, squeezed and smelt, and mirrors and water sprays enhance the bounteous aesthetic. Combined with the delicious aromas of fresh bread from the bakery section nearby, this multi-sensory spectacle stimulates your appetite and excitement for buying.
Other tactics direct your attention to keep you meandering though the supermarket for as long as possible. Dairy products, which are on almost everyone’s shopping list, are placed at the back of the store, so you are obliged to bypass everything else to reach them. In the aisles, popular items are placed in the middle to make you walk its length, and more expensive items act as bait set at eye-level. Wide aisles accommodate the shopping trolley, a concept introduced to encourage customers to buy in larger volumes.
These tricks, employed by supermarkets for decades, are not dissimilar to the attention-grabbing tactics used by some digital platforms today. Just like supermarkets, social media platforms are often blamed for the way they keep us absorbed by their content and hooked to their services, an idea described as the “attention economy”. But even though the supermarket was once ahead of the game, digital technology is now fighting to change the way the grocery market works.
Digital shopping baskets
We are already familiar with technology in the supermarket environment. The self-service checkout and hand-held scanner are two examples that have been growing in popularity mostly thanks to their timesaving nature, according to a study by The Nielsen Company in 2017. However, it doesn’t just stop there. The same study suggests that there is space for technology to have an even greater influence on the supermarket environment, and some examples of this already exist.
Amazon recently opened Amazon Go, a supermarket where computer vision allows you pick up your shopping and walk out without passing through a checkout. COOP Italy has also just opened its first ‘Supermarket of the Future’ designed by Carlo Ratti Associati, which provides customers with extensive information on overhead screens about the products they pick up. Though these are radical examples, they represent a move towards heightened technology in the supermarket in two key areas; efficiency and information provision.
It’s therefore not surprising that outside of the store, online food shopping is becoming increasingly popular. More information can be provided, personal preferences can be saved and often customers can save time. Newcomers such as Amazon Fresh delivery and automated product reordering services have boosted the growth of online grocery shopping, but still it faces two major barriers. Firstly, online shopping only works well for certain products that remain the same week-on-week; loo-roll or tinned tomatoes are good examples. And secondly, in Europe, 59% of consumers just prefer to buy groceries in a physical store. One could say that there are elements of the multi-sensory and physical browsing experience that make the buying process that bit easier and more enjoyable.
Full circle
The physical store also has other attractions that echo the pre-supermarket era. We see this in the growing popularity for buying local and small-scale food products, often from specialist shops and markets. This movement is clearly a reaction to the over-processed and de-personalised image that the supermarket has grown to have. It is about taking food shopping back to personal interactions and, most importantly, knowing where food has come from and how it was produced. But though many people would love to shop around for ethical and seasonal products, often it is just not possible. Modern schedules do not account for the time it takes, so again, convenience becomes the stronger driving force.
So how can technology find an in-between in the grocery market? What solutions could strike a balance between convenience, information and the human touch? The answer will be something that maintains physicality in grocery shopping, to give the full multi-sensory experience. There will have to be a wide choice of products to match our expectations, but filters to help us find what we want. And finally, there will have to be transparent information on production and composition of the products we buy. The fact that Amazon Go and the Supermarket of the Future both centre around physical interactions is certainly a step in the right direction, but they will need to be translated into the mainstream. At the EPFL+ECAL Lab, we working on a digital solution, for real supermarkets in the near future, that could do just that.
