CES 2018 - Highlights from Tech West & Eureka Park
Relevant Retail and CPG Trends at CES Tech West 2018 Each year Tech West at CES features a combination of all things connected (home, health and wellness, fitness and sports and family tech) as well as Eureka Park, which showcased nearly 1,000 individual tech startups in 2018. This year, MediaLink’s Tech West floor tours focused on the emerging technologies that will impact retail, QSR and CPG food/beverage. MediaLink curated the floor around specific interests for our clients including: ● Future of Retail/Shopper Experience ● Health & Fitness ● Personalization ● Impact of AR/VR, AI and Automation ● Packaging Technology ● Other Must-see Tech and Gadgets
Fast-moving consumer goods companies and their distribution and retail partners maintain symbiotic relationships that have been fine-tuned over decades. At CES this year, we see technology moving in faster than ever to disrupt those long-standing roles and partnerships. Below are some relevant examples we experienced at CES 2018’s Tech West venue that provide a glimpse into how technology is shaping the future of retail and CPG/food & beverage.
1. PHYSICAL RETAIL DISRUPTED AND REINVENTED
Autonomous and Augmented Physical Retail Aipoly - www.aipoly.com Aipoly’s mission is to turn any retail space into a fully autonomous market with no queues and no checkout. Aipoly uses visual recognition technology and AI to track individual shoppers throughout a store and recognize each item they take from shelf or case and automatically charge shoppers upon exit. Aipoly cleverly solves the “occlusion problem” (difficulty deciphering overlapping individuals and shapes in 3D space) using technology that maps unique relationships of human joints. Robomart - w ww.robomarts.com Groceries are soon to be a $1 trillion business worldwide, and perishables like fresh produce make up around 60% of all groceries sold. However just a tiny fraction of that - less than 5% - has moved online because people like to pick their own produce. To solve this and create other retail opportunities, Robomart is building a fleet of on-demand, self-driving stores that will be licensed to retailers to create affordable on-demand delivery services. Page 1 of 6
CES 2018 - Highlights from Tech West & Eureka Park
2sens - www.2sens.co 2sens is a smartphone-ready VR/AR software platform that enables virtual content to be naturally incorporated into the real world providing what they call, “true mixed reality.” Their unique technology analyzes a scene in real-time through a smartphone camera and enables 3D virtual content to naturally interact with the real world. Like Aipoly, 2sens is tackling the vexing “occlusion” problem by interpreting 3D objects in the environment and knowing where virtual content should exist and be rendered in 3D space (e.g., on top of a shelf, in front of a package, etc.). 2sens can have many VR/AR media applications including making retail experiences more fun and engaging. Count3r - w ww.count3r.com/en Retail and technology expert, G ene Munster Managing Partner of L oup Ventures, believes that eCommerce will top out at 55% of total retail sales. Count3r is a solution built to augment and bring the other 45% at physical retail into the future. As part of S tartupDelta and Holland’s Startup Pavilion at CES, Count3r showcased their tablet-based personal assistant platform that helps store associates provide the in-depth information that smart shoppers demand in high-spec, high-consideration retail categories. The company has already proven the platform’s ability to increase in-store conversion and basket sizes by up to 20% while saving sales associate time and increasing knowledge on the store floor.
Voice and Content Partnerships Bring Food/Bev Discovery Home Whether it’s ambient home speakers, smart kitchen appliances or in-car media, this year saw a slew of partnerships between content publishers and connected device manufacturers. Two most notable are the acquisition of Yummly by Whirlpool and the growth and pervasiveness of Meredith Digital’s Allrecipes platform across the digital ecosystem. Whirlpool+Yummly. Acquired by Whirlpool in 2017, Yummly will integrate curated cooking experiences into Whirlpool. The Yummly app identifies recipes, orders groceries and sends recipes to appliances as Yummly and Whirlpool seek to simplify meal times. Meredith’s Allrecipes is Everywhere. T he #1 food media brand globally, Allrecipes.com reaches 55MM uniques worldwide, is a top 10 social site and a staple of meal and recipe discovery on the internet. Allrecipes can now be found powering Amazon Alexa as an exclusive first-party skill for cooking and the site’s owner, Meredith, has also forged partnerships with Samsung to power recipes, list-making and food preferences in their smart, “Family Hub” refrigerator and begun work with a major automaker on in-car integrations. Page 2 of 6
CES 2018 - Highlights from Tech West & Eureka Park
2. Home Dispensing Disrupts the Manufacturer to Consumer Value Chain B2B Cosmetics (EMUAGE) - www.e-muage.com Emuage u ses a home dispensing system containing the active ingredients found in most skin care products to prepare personalized cosmetics in minutes at home. The Emuage system is designed around a smart system of water demineralization, QR-coded ingredient capsules and an app capable of skin scanning and generating customized recipes for cosmetics and skin care regimens. The company is bringing a new level of personalization and transparency in cosmetics production to the consumer. Altopa (Oblend) - w ww.oblend.com Altopa’s dispensary enables consumers to make custom herbal remedies at home. O blend creates teas, tinctures, culinary oils, massage oils, lotions, aromatherapies and supplements from legal herbal extracts and essential oils. The company produces capsules of essential oils and extracts of legal herbs like echinacea and lavender and then provides an app with recipes from experts and an online community to dial up precision blends. LifeFuels - w ww.lifefuels.co LifeFuels is a water bottle that provides optimized beverages customized to one’s unique metabolism and daily routines. Their Bottle works by providing simple and easy choices for vitamins, energy supplements and natural ingredients to help athletes and everyday people perform at a higher level throughout their day. Mitte - w ww.mitte.co Mitte enables consumers to create their own mineral water, just as nature does. Inspired by natural purification and mineralization, Mitte is a smart home water system that enhances water through a process that replicates the natural water cycle. It works in two simple steps: first, it purifies water with a proprietary distillation-based method then enhances it with essential minerals. Page 3 of 6
CES 2018 - Highlights from Tech West & Eureka Park
3. TECH MEETS ORGANIC AND FOOD TRANSPARENCY MOVEMENTS
Want Pure, Traceable Foods? Grow it Yourself. Grow - www.hellogrow.com My personal favorite of CES 2018, Grow promises to bring the ease and enjoyment of the “Blue Apron” home cooking business model to growing your own plants and vegetables. The company has created the world’s first intelligent planter that waters and monitors moisture, temperature and sunlight conditions, effectively providing a mini weather station. The company ships these modular planters preloaded with soil and provides ready made “seed sheets” for a range of greenery and edible vegetation. The result is a turnkey approach that empowers novice gardeners and their families to learn while eliminating the mistakes that can ruin an entire season and discourage lifelong enthusiasm for growing.
Opcom - w ww.opcomfarm.com Opcom takes “locally grown” to a whole new level with its modular, hydroponic Opcom Farming and Growpod system. It enables controlled indoor growing of food and plants from small kitchen setups to retail and large-scale industrial applications. Their futuristic Growpod exhibit inspires thoughts of future kitchens equipped to grow their own food, juice bars or grocery stores that redefine “fresh” for their shoppers, schools that teach kids how to live sustainably or even Martian installations that enable space explorers to sustainably grow fresh vegetation. Spirugrow - w ww.spirugrow.it Billed as “the food of the future” and "the ideal food for mankind” by the UN, Spirulina is an algae-based whole superfood rich in minerals, vitamins and proteins that can be consumed by humans and animals. It packs in more nutrition than any herb, plant or grain on the earth; e.g., 180% more Calcium than milk, and 670% more protein than Tofu. Spirugrow is pioneering consumer technology to grow this at home and begin to infuse it into different aspects of cooking and daily food consumption. Page 4 of 6
CES 2018 - Highlights from Tech West & Eureka Park
Food Quality, Safety and Supply Chain Traceability Aryballe Technologies, NeOse - w ww.neosepro.com Just as computing and sensing technologies have come to rely on visual and auditory inputs, smell is on track to become a new sense incorporated into our AI-enabled and autonomous future. Arybelle is early to market with their portable, universal odor sensing technology that records scents with unique detailed digital signatures that can be used for a wide array of applications. In food and beverage, their technology will be used in manufacturing to monitor quality and consistency, cosmetics companies will engineer highly nuanced fragrances and consumers will see this technology appear in their refrigerators to detect when food has spoiled. Merck Pharmaceuticals - aCe Project - w ww.merckgroup.com The global black market for counterfeit pharmaceuticals and fake medicines is estimated to have reached $75B to $200B per year. This not only impacts pharma profits but represents a global health crisis not only because patients are not getting the medicinal cures they need but many fake drugs can have negative health effect. To combat the global counterfeit pharmaceuticals problem, Merck’s aCe provides an anti-counterfeit solution that combines novel nanotech scanning with a robust blockchain architecture. aCe scanning technology reads QR codes down to the the digital ink signature level, making it very difficult to counterfeit, and then uses a robust blockchain architecture to record and verify supply chain and distribution transactions. This technology promises to have applications well beyond the pharma industry to food, beverage/spirits as well as apparel and luxury goods.
Takeaways and Implications Going Forward At CES this year, we see the continuing evolution and blowing apart of traditional food and beverage industry value chains by things like eCommerce, home dispensing, autonomous retail and new delivery capabilities. At the same time, technology is providing more power and transparency than ever over the choices we make in the nutrition and remedies that support our lifestyles. CPG and retail companies need to adapt to these new pathways in discovering and purchasing what we consume and continue to solve for some important challenges such as: ● Just how far will consumers go to personalize and control the ingredients and attributes of the foods they consume? ● What will be the role of traditional CPG brands in a world of personalized foods and beverages? ● How will these new tech-enabled pathways to discovery of products and ingredients impact how marketers reach and engage end-consumers? ● How will physical retail continue to evolve as a complement to eCommerce and increasingly connected shopping behaviors? Page 5 of 6
CES 2018 - Highlights from Tech West & Eureka Park
For more information on MediaLink’s innovation strategy offerings for brands and agencies, go-to-market and growth strategy for media and technology companies as well as curated journeys at important industry events like CES, SXSW, Cannes and other venues contact: Bill Westcott, SVP MediaLink 1155 Avenue of the Americas, 8th Floor New York, NY 10036
[email protected] www.linkedin.com/in/billwestcott/ O: 646-722-3610 M: 917-687-6915
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