Visit the ‘Supermarket of the Future’ at Milan Expo 2015

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The core theme of Expo Milano 2015 – “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life” poses two very important questions:

1. How are we going to feed ourselves in the coming decades?
2. What information would we like to have prior to buying food?

The answer to both the questions can be found at the Future Food District of the Expo, which features an innovative, interactive, and social ‘Supermarket of the Future’ displaying an exhaustive array of over 1,500 products from 5 leading food production chains.

Conceived by Carlo Ratti, Director of the SENSEable City Lab at MIT, Boston, and developed in collaboration with Coop, this pioneering concept spreads over a total area of 2,500 square meters and is indeed a ‘micro universe’ exploring new ways of interaction between people and food.

The Inspiration

Modern food buyers simply visit a supermarket and stack their shopping carts with a wide array of food products without even bothering to look at their labels and understand their characteristics and origins.

The core inspiration behind installing this Supermarket is to recreate the feeling of a street marketplace and bolster it with best-in-class ‘smart’ technologies to appeal to modern consumers.

This Supermarket space recreates the age-old practice of buying food and an era when consumers had a clearer idea of the food production and distribution processes, i.e., they knew everything about the food they were buying and consuming.

The Supermarket of the Future aims to remove all barriers between food producers and consumers and allows everyone to have a more direct relationship with food, with the help of new technology. At the same time, it provides a real network for consumers to understand all the critical steps of a food chain in order to make an informed buying decision.

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The Concept

First introduced at the Milan Expo 2015, the Supermarket is an experimental space – a place where visitors can find a direct correlation with the food industry and a place where producers, consumers, and products can interrelate with each other.

The Social Element

The Supermarket recreates the look and feel of a meeting place, similar to that of a traditional market. User-friendly interfaces backed by new breed technologies simplify human interactions, thus giving back to the selling chain its long-lost social dimension.

Customers can enjoy an informative shopping experience with the help of flat screens, interactive tables, and displays. The open landscape of the Supermarket facilitates the formation of contacts, business networks, and relations between local producers who can use the supermarket as a free-exchange area.

Technological Innovation

This Supermarket introduces some of the latest innovations in the food retail sector, such as:

• LED shelf illumination;
• Grocery display bins containing raw products made from Plexiglas;
• Custom furnishings such as tilt-top tables that are lower than standard shelving units;
• Stalls that come with touch screen display providing additional information beyond what is displayed on product labels; and
• Interactive showcases with LED sensors that familiarize visitors with the production, consumption, and distribution of food in the future.

The products are exhibited on large interactive tables – just a light touch is enough to obtain detailed information about their origins, history, and characteristics!    

Huge screens suspended over the tables provide different information about the products, depending on the user’s degree of interaction. At the first interactive level, visitors can obtain data about the article’s price and characteristics; at a higher level, visitors can simply touch a product displayed on the screen to obtain a much more detailed label revealing its origins and history.

Fostering Interaction, Creating Awareness

The Supermarket of the Future is indeed a bold step forward in revolutionizing the practice of food purchase, distribution, and consumption. It has opened up numerous channels of communication between food producers and consumers and is helping modern buyers to make more informed decisions about the kind of food products they buy.

Most importantly, it is helping people form a direct correlation with the most basic necessity of their lives – food.

Thinking to open a supermarket of the future or a specialty shop? We can help you!