KIBBUTZ BEIT KESHET, Israel--(BUSINESS WIRE)--With social distancing driving an urgent consumer demand for touchless grocery self-checkout, Shekel, the leader in AI-powered advanced weighing solutions, brings to market the Fast Track – the first touchless machine-learning, cloudless self-checkout solution enabler. Shekel’s Fast Track eliminates the need for consumers to enter product codes via touch screens by automatically recognizing produce, bakery and specialty items.
“The global COVID-19 pandemic brings the need for a new self-checkout model into sharp focus,” said Mike Valenti, senior research consultant at Frost & Sullivan. “Shekel’s Fast Track solution answers the demand for grocery and supermarkets to provide safe, touchless and easy-to-use self-checkout solutions to protect both employees and customers.” Valenti noted that the seamless integration of the Shekel solution addresses retailers’ concerns about lengthy installation downtime as well.
According to a recent consumer survey conducted by SurveyMonkey and sponsored by Shekel Brainweigh, nearly two-thirds of consumers are changing their grocery shopping habits in response to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. And 87% of shoppers say they would prefer to shop in stores with touchless or robust self-checkout options.
“The pandemic forces grocery and supermarket retailers to address the unprecedented challenge of keeping grocery workers and consumers safe through accelerated adoption of self-checkout solutions,” said Yedidia Yossef, CEO of Shekel. “Traditional self-checkout solutions don’t provide shoppers with a truly touchless solution and they lack the near-perfect accuracy of Shekel’s Fast Track.”
As an added benefit, Shekel is answering retailers’ needs for improved accuracy and security, which will provide much needed loss prevention, reduce errors at checkout and deliver superior self-checkout experiences for their customers. Fast Track’s constant machine learning allows existing retailer POS hardware to teach itself how to recognize new products resulting in fast deployment.
The superior accuracy and security of Shekel’s Fast Track significantly reduces loss, errors and checkout-time at the point-of-sale (POS) as well as greatly improving customers’ checkout experience. Powered by the serverless and cloudless framework of the VRM (Virtual Recognition Module) platform, Shekel Fast Track offers the following benefits to grocery and supermarket retailers:
- Easy implementation, requiring only a simple USB camera; framework is downloaded through an API
- No infrastructure costs – retailers use their own devices to train their AI models
- No data collection – The VRM uses data generated at the store level
- Up to 99% accuracy in recognition
- Privacy – No transferring of data means no or very limited privacy concerns
- Adaptive continuous weighing using AI for visual recognition of fresh produce
- Allows for a faster checkout process for consumers
- Higher security for retailers
About Shekel
Publicly traded as Shekel Brainweigh Ltd. (ASX:SBW), Shekel is a well-established technology market leader revolutionizing the retail industry for more than 40 years. Following the last years of disruption in the retail market, the company has reinvented itself embracing the newest technologies of IoT and data analytics to enhance and enlarge its retail market offerings, enabling retailers to adapt to the dramatic changes taking place. For more information, visit https://theshekelgroup.com/.
