Host Mike Graen sits down with Tyler Davis from Woodman's and Mark Shake from Badger Technologies to the implementation of Badger's retail solutions, including AI and machine learning for security and disinfection applications.

Woodman's, a 240,000 square feet grocery store chain, uses Badger's robots to verify pricing accuracy daily, reducing the need for manual checks and improving customer experience. The robots also assist in identifying out-of-stock items and optimizing product placement.

Woodmans' 20 stores, primarily in the Midwest, benefit from these automations, enhancing operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

The vision for badger is to be a retail

solutions company. We've been working very hard on our

analytics platform with our artificial intelligence, AI and

our machine learning. So we're very proud of that. And we have

new applications for security. We have new applications for

disinfectant using the robots. Now, you know, with covid and

post covid, we know how important that is for the the

industry and for the communities. Woodmans is a 18

location Midwestern store, but what's unique about Woodmans is

they're about 240,000 square feet of selling. So for them, it

was a lot about product location and tag location, and they

initially came to us to see if the robot can aid them in

identifying and making sure the right price tags are in the

right zones of the store.

Pricing compliance is a huge deal. That's the

customer side of our business. We want you to see the price on

the shelf and the price ring correctly at the register. Prior

to having a robot in the store, the pricing coordinator would

have to leave their department for a week every month to go out

to the aisles and scan item by item, just to price, verify the

robot's now doing what we were doing every month for a week

every single day. So

grocers because they have to find more

creative ways to save and they're finding that the robot

is allowing them to cut costs in the right place, but more

importantly, allow their associates to spend more

interaction with the customers, which is improving the in store

experience. Woodmans also uses us for identifying any items

that are out of stock, Woodman's is one of the first clients to

use it to upgrade their mobile app that their consumers use to

shop with.

Customer can now be in our store, look up an item,

find its location within the grocery aisles. There's 24

aisles. There's about 30,000 products on just the grocery

department shelves alone.

Another unique thing that Woodmans uses our

product location for is that the robot will send the product

location to the distribution center, so when they're

replenishing now, Woodmans pre pallets sit to go exactly where

in the aisle, where it should be.

Now we have this product location in a nice list.

We provided it to our distribution warehouses who are

starting to pick orders within our aisles. So now we're not

reducing some of this breakdown time of the incoming product

through our analytic and AI platform, the

robot, can tell the stores by category, what items are more

frequently out of stock. So it's really giving them a lot of on

shelf data that they normally would have people looking for

the small, independent grocery retailers typically don't have

the IT infrastructure to do a lot of system things that the

larger tier one grocers might be able to do. This had a great

time in collaboration and working on new projects together

and testing new ideas.

Sky's the limit when it comes to the robot

project right now, if we can develop it. We're going to

develop it just to see if there's another available piece

of information that we can compare to enhance another

report, create another report, enhance another job down the

line. We're willing and open to take any possibility with the

robot at this point.

Well, good morning, good afternoon and good evening.

Wherever you happen to be, my name is Mike Graen, and we're

back with another conversation with retail and the University

of Arkansas Supply Chain organization talking about on

shelf availability. And you saw a video just a few minutes ago,

a little bit of a teaser. We actually have one of the guys

who was in that video, Tyler Davis, who will be introducing

here in a second, but that was a few years ago, and now he's,

he's, he's a couple years older and a couple of years wiser.

He's got some interesting things that he wants to tell us about

Woodmans, as well as the use of technology like badger to drive

alerting and on shelf availability. So we've got Tyler

here. We've also got Mark Shake. Mark Shake is with the Badger

Corporation. Mark's been doing this for a long, long time, and

is really is an expert in the solution at retail that

identifies what I'm going to call things that are out of the

normal, normal so spills in the floor or out of stocks or

pricing, etc, some of the stuff that you saw in that video, you

saw Tyler and me talking about. So before I before I get too

far, let me start with Tyler once you just unmute yourself

and introduce yourself to the to the audience. For us,

Tyler Davis, I work for when. Food Markets. I am an

IT pricing clerk here, and I support all of our pricing

departments at the office level and at the store level. I am in

charge of the robots and all the fun that we get to do with them.

I also support some of our receiving and just our general

pricing systems here at Woodman's.

Awesome. How long have you been with Woodman's

Tyler?

It was 18 years this year.

18 years. Did you start off in the store? Did you

always start in the home office?

I started at a store 18 years ago. I then

transferred and opened two stores before I came to the

office. I've been at the office for eight years now, gotcha,

gotcha, put you on the spot a little bit. How has

the experience working in a store? Does that help, rather

than just starting in a home office, I would think it would

be hugely helpful, because you get to live the life, and then

you can come and build solutions for the folks of the work that

you used to do. Does that is that true?

Absolutely, at the office, I tend to be a voice of

something designed within the office on paper doesn't always

play out in a real application, so I can kind of be like, well,

this point and this point might need to be finessed a little bit

more before we put into live action at the store. I was able

to bring a lot of just pain points from the store here, and

we've been able to focus on and work on them. And as development

of the robot has gone, we've I've been able to really take my

experience at the store level and focus on what the robot can

do to truly impact day to day life at the store.

That's awesome. That's awesome. The CEO of

Walmart, a guy named Doug McMillan, he used to say to me

all the time, because I both worked in a store at Walmart and

then worked in the corporate office. He goes, Mike, we don't

have cash registers in the home office. We're here to support

the stores. Let's just be really clear on what we're focusing

Yeah, it was a pretty good line. It was very memorable. Mark

Shake. Tell us about your tell us about your career path. I

know you didn't start with Badger. You've been around for a

while in the technology, retail, technology space. Tell us a

little bit about Mark Shake, yeah. So

thanks, Mike. Thank you, Tyler, for participating.

So yeah, been with Badger. Vice currently, Vice President

Business Development with Badger. Work a lot with our

partner, partners in the market like Whitman's. My background

has really evolved in technology. Really grew up in

the in the technology and telecommunications industry,

really at the enterprise level. And about 70 years ago, had the

opportunity to was introduced to badger and they were looking for

a business person, someone other than an engineer. So I had the

opportunity to come on board and really get my feet wet and learn

the business, both robotics and, most importantly, the retail

space. So I've enjoyed the ride. I've spent more time in a

grocery store than I ever imagined so

well, here we're going to ask you exactly every

nut and bolt we talked to the wrong guy. You're the you're the

you're the practical guy. You're you're less about how it works

internally. You're more about us for the customers, which is

really what we're probably interested more in this

conversation as well, right? So Tyler, I'm gonna kick it back to

you. So tell us about Woodmans. If I if I've never heard of

Woodmans before, tell us a little bit about Woodmans, the

number of stores you got, what your stores look like, who your

target customer? Anything you want to tell us about Woodmans,

just give us a little bit of view. If people aren't in your

area, the Chicago kind of Wisconsin area, if they're on

the West Coast, they probably never heard of you before. So

give us a little bit of background on who would this

woodmans is. Was founded in 1919, and a little

produce stand in Janesville. We are now on our fourth generation

of Woodman as Clint has taken over, and Phil is still around.

You know, he's out in the stores all the time, but Clinton's kind

of running the operations from the office now. And yeah, we've

been around. We've got 20 stores opening. Well, we're opening our

20th next year, Racine, Wisconsin. And how big are?

How big are these stores? And are they primarily

grocery, or do they have apparel and other things as well? Tell

us a little bit about them.

They are about 230,000 square feet. They're

quite large stores, primarily three. There is haba, HPC,

frozen, dairy, meat, very service orientated, low cost,

low price, just trying to keep things down and keep the volume

up. And, yeah,

wow, if I compare that to a the one of the biggest

WalMart super centers, I know it's 220,000 square foot, but

that's growth, grocery, health and beauty. Apparel,

electronics, automotive service, all like sporting goods, etc.

230,004 foot supercenter, or, I'm sorry, grocery store. Yep,

any grocery item ever you should be able to buy it in the

woodmans, right? That you're saying, hopefully,

hopefully, yeah, variety is key. We have about

100,000 active UPCS on the floor at any given time in most of our

stores, we have a couple smaller locations, little older

locations, but you know, generally, about 100,000 a

little over 50,000 of those are picked up by the robots daily.

Nice, awesome, awesome. And tell us, tell us,

maybe a little bit about your customer base. Who is the is it

people, because they're, they're coming from a location which is

close to you? Is there a loyalty program? How to, how do you

maintain your constant growth with your customers?

We focus on offering the lowest prices and

the most variety. So we generally, you know, we prefer

to cater to everybody, but we, um, generally, cater to

families. You know, come shop at Woodmans and stock up while you

can. We're located off of major interstates. Generally, we're

spread out a little bit. You're not going to have multiple

woodmans locations and cities other than Madison, which is

right by our corporate office.

Gotcha. Gotcha. All right, cool. So Mark, I'm gonna

kick it over to you. You guys are in Lexington, Kentucky. I

don't think there's a Woodmans in Lexington, Kentucky. Last

time I checked, so how did you and Woodmans decide? Hey, we got

some we got some opportunities to do some business together.

Tell us a little bit about Badger. And you know how the

initial discussions with Woodmans transpired?

Yeah, absolutely. So just a little bit about badger,

our company. So badger, we're right at a seven year old

company, somewhat of a startup, but we are a product division of

Jable, which is a contract manufacturing company at New

York publicly traded company. New York Stock Exchange,

publicly traded, do about 32 billion in revenue. So about six

and a half years ago, they acquired Badger as one of their

first product offerings to really take to market themselves

as a result. You know, within Badger there, our primary focus

is collecting actionable data within the retail space that

leverages that data, both for the retailer to improve on their

operations that could be in store, conditions around

inventory and what's happening on the shelf, as well as also

what's happening in the store as it relates to safety and

cleanliness. So the two prime you know, multiple use cases

there with each different solution, but we're, we leverage

our retail Solution Suite, if you will, with leveraging that

collection of the data with fully autonomous robots

operating in store. So it's been an exciting ride, very

disruptive. And something that we're extremely excited about is

this industry continues to unfold in the different you

know, retailers as well as suppliers who were servicing,

you know, those specific that those industries you know, are

ramping up and becoming more familiar with the solutions that

are out there. With regards to Woodmans, I was very fortunate

had the opportunity to take the first robot up to Woodmans. When

we deploy a robot into Woodmans, or into any store we like, we

walk the store and collect mapping data. That's what the

robot utilizes to for navigation purposes, but had the

opportunity to go in and meet Tyler for the first time. I

could tell you, Tyler probably was not necessarily a fan of

robotics. He was more skeptical than anything. I welcome the

challenge, but he anyway, he was just fun to kind of engage with

early on, only because he was skeptical, and it kind of set a

challenge for us. So, you know, we went in there and really had

the robot set up within, you know, a couple of hours, we

began scanning some shelves and then showing the data associated

with that. So very quickly, Tyler had a lot of questions,

and quickly over, over the course of the next few weeks, I

think we brought them over to the other side.

Nice, nice. Well, here's an easy segue transition.

Tyler, do you remember the story in the first meeting that way?

Or did you see it a little bit differently than that? Tell us

about because here's, let's say you came from the stores. You're

all about delivering value, and every day low prices. Why do I

want to buy this big piece of equipment? It's just going to

cost more money, and then we have to add cost to the system.

But somehow you got you went from a skeptic to this is pretty

cool. We need to do this. Tell your side of the story. We'll

see how well it matches with what Mark said.

No Mark was absolutely right. Our corporate

office shares a parking lot with one of our stores, and that was

a store we were piloting the robot in. They didn't really

share that that was even happening. And then that day,

somebody had said, you know, there's a robot over at the

store. And I was like, for what marketing gimmick Are we playing

today? And they're like, no, no, no. It's so it's to do things

and read the shelves and stuff. And then I really thought we

were joking around, so coworker and I ran over across the store

to see it, and I kind of was like, nope, I've got questions

right out the gate. We've got to discuss some things. This is

nuts, and it's never going to work here. So I picked the

brains and asked them all sorts of questions. You know, what

happens when the internet goes out? Does this thing just start

running around, knocking things over, taking people out? Like,

how much fun do we need to get a lasso involved? Like, so I was

just very skeptical. And then Clint, our CEO, he had known I

was very skeptical about it, and he said, you know, you don't

seem to think this is really something that's going to apply

to us. So why don't you run the project? If they can prove you

wrong, then maybe we have something here. So that's how I

got involved with the robots.

So the moral of the story, don't be skeptical, or

you'll get assigned the project Exactly. If you can convince

Tyler this is a good idea, you made the sale so. Well, let's be

honest here. So, so you, you said Mark six to seven years

ago, 10 years whatever. 10 years ago, we didn't have robots in

stores. We had people, right? We had people. So Tyler walked us

through this transition. So Tyler's going, Hey, I used to do

this work in the store. Now you got a robot doing it. What

exactly is the robot automating that, frankly, is probably

better to be done by a robot than a person. Let's start out

with Tyler. You started out as a skeptic. What are the things

that you learned about what it could do and how it could help

the store associates that you now became a Wow we got to think

about this.

Well, first off, the accuracy. I didn't really

think that it was going to be an accurate product. I didn't think

that we were going to see it, be able to read the shelves and

then be able to rely on that data as much as we are. So that

was the first big thing. It's just the fact that it it really

did what they said it was going to do, and it wasn't one of

those fun things that works for a while. And then, yeah, push

that off to the side right now. Um, so that was a big thing for

me. And price verifying, when I could see that it was truly

pointing out price errors on the shelf was a really big push for

me, because I was a pricing coordinator at one of our

stores, and I had to stop what I was doing and go price verify

about once a month. And it's boring. It's so boring our

shelves are extremely long, and that aisle is just overwhelming

to start with, and scanning every product, you stop paying

attention. You skip sections. The robot was hitting all of it

every day and just keeping up to date.

So we'll make sure I understand, for the 100,000

items you've got, your verifiers would literally take a device

scan the shelf. Label say the point of sale says it's $4.20

the label says $4.20 that one matches go to the second. That's

what we're talking about, literally scanning every single

shelf item.

Yes, well, that sounds painful. It really was.

Wow, wow,

collected and nicely put in a little basket

too here you go. This is what you need to take care of today.

That's awesome. People may not understand why is

verifying prices important? Okay, so they're off a little

bit. What's the what's the I mean, I'm obviously being

cynical, because I know what the answer is going to be, but they

can be for a retailer perspective, why is pricing

accuracy at the shelf? Very, very important?

Well, the customer experience first and foremost.

Yeah, but there are also state auditors that come in, fines can

be assessed if too many pricing errors are found, but I mean

primarily in first focus always the customer. So just making

sure that the accurate price is on their receipt, that they

picked it up off the shelf is number one.

So picking up an item off the shelf that says $4

and when I get the register, it's $4.80 you could dissatisfy

customer. Oh, they're trying their little bait and switch

here. I picked it up here, but they're charging me more money

they thought I didn't see that, huh? So, all right, Mark, over

to you. So what else does this thing do? So walk us through

kind of the the beginning, because, because the first thing

I don't know that we've even said it, walk us what a run

would look like. And we've got this animated video we'll show

behind the scenes, but we're talking about a robot that

absolutely plugs into the wall by itself, charges itself and at

specified times, undocks and goes, does tasks in store. Walk

us through what that looks like.

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, as you stated, The robot's

fully autonomous. So if you can imagine just a wireless device

within the retail space. So whether it's a wireless funnel

or, you know, whatever, it's just a simply a wireless device,

we just require an area, probably three by three, three

foot by three foot, to park the robot in, typically on the main

sales floor, and it's stays it plugs in the charger, plugs into

a standard, standard outlet, no infrastructure requirements

whatsoever on the retailer's side. So we deploy the robot,

and really within the robot, we have two primary solutions. The

one solution running at Woodman's is references insight,

that's giving visibility, collecting on shelf data, around

out of stocks, incorrect products and mispriced items.

And then the second solution is really that's called our

inspect, and that's where the robot can operate throughout the

day when it's not scanning the shelf to physically inspect the

floor. So from a retailer's perspective, and providing duty

of care for a clean, safe environment. The robot now

provides a highly compliant store walk program that gives

before and after images that risk management teams can

reference in the event there's an incident in the store. So

really, connection wise, the robot operating the store is

very simplistic, not nothing required, at least from an

internet connection other than an internet connection at the

store level. And then, depending on the retailer, we stand up,

you know, our solutions against their in store operations. And,

you know, make just for purposes of improving those operational

efficiencies around whether it's pricing and auditing or

replenishment or even post analytics on the data. Why are

these issues occurring in my store and looking more down up

the chain, as it relates to supply chain? So again, numerous

use cases across the board, depending on how the retailer is

leveraging it. And to Tyler's point, right? I mean, retailers

are faced with a lot of demands. They have a lot of product, a

lot of suppliers, a lot of people in and out of their

store. They have customers. They have people they have to manage

by leveraging these type of, you know, 10 years ago, you would

have looked at it as very disruptive, almost now, you you

know, I would envision retailers looking at is this would be a

must have, because you're standing up programs that are

that are offering greater compliance, as well as conducted

more often, And you're collecting more usable data out

of your store on a more timely basis, so you can make faster

decisions that will help, hopefully be a positive impact

to the bottom line.