Trigo's retail tech revolution rivals Amazon

• Published date: 19 January 2023
• Publication title: Globes (Rishon LeZion, Israel)

I admit that I tried. During my shopping trip, I took a packet of cookies and then put it on another shelf. I shoved a pack of chewing gum into my jeans pocket, put some cheese in my shopping bag, then had second thoughts and placed it back in the fridge. 30 seconds after I left the supermarket, I received an accurate receipt on my phone including the promotional discounts. Even the chewing gum in my pocket was included in the tally

Trigo CEO and co-founder Michael Gabay seemed unconcerned with my attempts to sabotage the system. He was even quite amused. "The technology creates a 3D visualization of the space using basic cameras installed in the ceiling," he explains. "Our initial product offers shoppers the ability to enter a store, take what they want and leave.

"This basically gives us a foot in the door to working with all major retailers, but the operating system we developed will enable many more things, such as accurate inventory control on shelves, connection to e-commerce systems, inventory management systems, and order management systems. We give the retailer complete control over what happens in the space, along with a cross-sectional analysis of consumer behavior."

What behavior, for example?

"The system can analyze competition between different manufacturers, products consumers look at more, products that people remove from the shelf, then bring back and take the competition. These are things that no other system today knows how to analyze. They don't understand the customer journey, the unidentifiable consumer behavior in the shopping space itself. For example, private label versus major brands. Retailers are interested in understanding what makes the consumer buy their store brand and not the competitor. We can provide that information."

Shop without feeling like you're working for the store

The idea for Trigo came from Gabay's personal experience, as the person charged by his wife with the household supermarket shopping trip. "I would go there on Friday mornings, and the experience really frustrated me. I saw a very big gap between the technologies I knew existed and what was being used in the retail world in those days.

"The global food retail market has a turnover of $7 trillion a year, and I thought there was an opportunity here. I told my brother Daniel, our CTO, an artificial intelligence researcher by training who served in Talpiot [the elite IDF technology unit], and we started working. We built a smart shopping cart in my living...