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“This is how the supermarket of the future will look,” Luca Setti, Future
Food District Coop Manager, tells me as I walk into the large,
rectangularshaped building in Milan, Italy.
It’s rainy and I am an hour late for my appointment. “It’s in the middle of
Expo’s main road, when you find the Spanish pavilion—and you can’t
miss it—you’re there,” I am told every time I stop and ask for directions.
The Supermarket of the FutureKnows Exactly What You’re Eating
May 28, 2015 / 6:15 pm
BY ALBERTO MUCCI
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But it’s no easy task. Milan’s World Fair (Expo 2015) extends over 1.1
million square meters of exhibition area. This edition’s theme is “Feeding
the Planet, Energy for Life,” and all around me are schoolchildren and
elderly groups rushing from one side to the other in excitement, from the
Sudanese pavilion built as a large seemingly concrete desert house to the
giant LCDscreenendowed mill at the entrance of Thailand’s pavilion.
Coop, Italy’s largest supermarket chain, decided to build a prototype of a
future supermarket for their installation at the foodthemed World’s Fair.
To implement the idea, it hired Accenture—a USbased management
consulting and technology services—and Carlo Ratti Studio with the help
of the MIT Senseable City Lab, run by Ratti himself.
I ask Ratti via email if he had something in mind he wanted to emulate
when his studio was commissioned the work by Coop. He did, and the
inspiration came from literature. As the professor himself explains: “An
All photos by Fabio Sanna of Accenture Multimedia Agency, Accenture S.P.A.
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image that I always liked is that of Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino,
immersed in a Parisian fromagerie, which has the impression of being in
a museum or in an encyclopedia,” he says. “This shop is a museum: Mr.
Palomar, visiting it, feels as he does in the Louvre, behind every displayed
object the presence of the civilization that has given it form, and takes
form from it.”
The inspiration might be odd, but the result is surprising, and incredibly
beautiful. Getting groceries was never really about the shopping
experience for me—it was simply an instrumental act of survival: in, food,
out. But not this time. If I had the money, I would spend hours inside
Coop and buy everything it has to offer, from the wine to the oranges
packaged right in front of you by robots with mechanical hands.
If usually a supermarket is organized by three main sections (fresh, super
fresh, and dry foods), Coop’s instead follows the natural production
chains. As I walk in, I find the fresh fruit and vegetable section organized
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in the first production chain. It starts from tomatoes and reaches canned
tomato sauces; it goes from grapes to bottled wine.
There are also no shelves in the supermarket of the future, and there is a
good reason for it. Buying food should be a moment of exchange and
interactions, not the hasty choir it represents for most people. As Ratti
explains to me, “We are interested above all in human interactions;
interactions between people and products and between people and
people.”
So when purchasing bananas in the Coop supermarket, not only will
customers be able to see the person in front of them buying canned
pineapple, but who knows—they might even start a conversation.
This interaction among customers is facilitated by Coop’s decision to
substitute the normal supermarket shelves with long, low wooden tables.
“It’s just like entering a local market,” Alfredo Richelmi, Accenture Senior
Manager, says happily with a smile and adding that “people need to
be able to see each other, and this is one of the reasons we decided to
build tables that are these low.”
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The logistics at the basis of such an environment are no easy task. “Those
over there,” Setti explains, “are elevators installed to help with the
stocking process. They allow tables to shelf less items, and look
friendlier.”
On top of the booths are what Richelmi—with a smile and a bit of pride—
calls “the sails,” a series of black screens placed one next to the other,
hovering on top of the entire production chain. As I move towards the
booths, the sails light up. When I pick up a tomato, a set of data pops up
on the screen in front of me telling me where the tomato was grown, as
well as its nutritional properties (vitamins, minerals, etc.) and even its
carbon footprint.
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The night before my visit, I had radicchio for dinner. Eager to know more
about my meal, I look around for the purple and white chicory. I find it,
pick it up, and discover that it contains vitamin B1, B2, B3, B5, C, E, K, J,
and even P, and that its associated carbon emissions are also very low.
This information is shown through the bright green silhouette of a foot on
a percentage scale. Ecofriendly vitamins—a bargain.
“You see those?” Accenture retail lead Alberto Pozzi asks me, pointing
towards three small red dots coming out from the bottom right of the
screen. “It’s the Kinect gesture recognition technology. To create
the interactive tables and the vertical shelves, we simply used a
mature gaming technology and applied it to a different objective.”
The supermarket of the future seems primarily conceived to be a health
freak’s paradise. Customers have the option of downloading an app,
typing in their preferred diet (vegetarian, lowcarb, you name it), and
having an algorithm suggest the best products the supermarket has to
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offer that meets their preferences. If you’re curious to know what
everyone else in the supermarket is buying, customers can check out the
infographics that aggregate all of the supermarket’s data on a large wall
right on top of the checkout section, with a ranking of the mostbought
items. When I am there—Thursday, around noon—beer is the second
item on the list. The charts, infographics, and maps projected on the
supermarket’s wall make Vanilla Sky technology pale in comparison, yet
it seems quite a useless feature; one that seems built only with the
purpose to impress.
Just behind where I am standing and looking at the screen is a cold
storage unit containing meat and fish packaging, prototypes of what
packaging in 2020 and in 2050 could look like. “The idea,” Setti tells me,
“is to create a packaging facility able to allow food to last much longer
than it does now for the benefit of both the client—think about how much
food is thrown away because it has gone bad—and for the environment.
Less waste, less emissions, less packaging.”
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I ask Pozzi if it’s the future supermarket for the rich, or for everyone.
“Just look at the prices,” he answers. And it’s true, they are the prices of a
normal supermarket. What is expensive is the supermarket itself: around
15 million euros, I am told after a bit of resistance.
At the moment, there is no set plan to make the prototype into an actual
supermarket. As Ratti elegantly sums up at the end of our email
exchange: “It is an experiment from which we could all learn important
lessons, some of which may later be transferred to the real world. Alan
Kay used to say, ‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it.’ If that
is true, then it is essential that we all contribute to this endeavour:
building a future that belongs to all of us.”
TOPICS: Alberto Pozzi, carbon footprint, CarlRatti, Coop, environmentalism,Expo2015, groceries, Italy, Milan, radicchio, shopping, tomatoes, World's Fair
