Amazon Go Grocery brings fresh fruit and vegetables to the cashierless shopping experience

Amazon has actually revealed its most current physical retail principle — a cashier-free Amazon Go shop that offers fresh groceries.

The Amazon Go Grocery shop, which opens in downtown Seattle on Tuesday, enables consumers to purchase groceries without running products through a checkout and even swiping a card.

This “just walk out” innovation, as Amazon has actually called it, initially appeared in 2016 with the launch of Amazon Go — a cashierless corner store offering fast-moving products like treats, beverages and ready-made meals. Amazon has actually presented 25 of these Go shops in city areas throughout the United States, now the seller wishes to bring the principle better to the ‘burbs. That implies brand-new items like fresh produce, bread and baked items, meat and alcohol — the examples you’d purchase in your weekly grocery store.

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Inside Amazon’s brand-new cashierless grocery store

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The basic technology behind Amazon Go hasn’t changed with the launch of the grocery concept. Cameras in the ceiling work with sensors underneath shelves to track shoppers as they walk through the store, detecting when items are taken off shelves. Once an item is removed, it goes into a virtual cart and shoppers can walk out without going through a traditional check out — the bill is paid via credit card through the Go app.

But while the concept is similar, things have changed with the addition of fresh produce. Amazon says it had to update the machine learning driving its system to account for things like multiple customers grabbing different fresh food items, or fridge doors fogging up after being left open.

We took a look around the Seattle store ahead of the opening and, by and large, it feels like a suburban grocery store, with a mix of prepackaged goods and fresh items — all spread across 7,700 square feet.

The produce is sold in packages or by the item (like avocados at $1.19 each) so there’s no weighing to confuse the process. But after walking out, the system had worked out that I’d taken just one tomato (not the three or four I picked up while I was checking for freshness) alongside a handful of other groceries.

There’s no word on whether this concept will come to other cities — Amazon’s reps were tight-lipped about rollout plans during our brief store visit. According to Bloomberg reports ahead of the 2018 launch of Amazon Go, sources close to the company said Amazon planned on opening 3,000 Go stores by 2021. Amazon declined to comment on this figure ahead of the Go Grocery launch.

According to Amazon, the Seattle store is also a different concept to the grocery store the company is set to open in Woodland Hills this year. The company confirmed it would be opening this store in Los Angeles during 2020, though there is currently no word on how the store will be branded.