Shownotes
In this Omni Talk Retail episode, Vipul Chawla, CEO of Singapore's FairPrice Group, reveals how their "Store of Tomorrow" has eliminated four critical friction points and delivered jaw-dropping results.
From smart shopping trolleys that auto-generate your list to Vision AI that learns unusual patterns without programming, Vipul breaks down how omnichannel retail innovation drives an 70-80% increase in basket size and 82% self-checkout adoption. He shares insights on frictionless experiences, AI-powered store management tools, endless aisle integration, and why even senior customers are embracing these technologies.
If you've ever wondered what purposeful retail innovation looks like at scale, this interview is for you!
🔑 Topics covered:
- The four customer friction points killing grocery basket size Smart shopping trolleys with personalized navigation and recommendations
- How electronic shelf labels guide customers to products and offers Vision AI that detected shoplifting without being programmed for it 70
-80% basket size increase and 82% self-checkout adoption rates
-Grocer Genie: AI-powered store management on smartphones
- Endless aisle strategy connecting physical stores to digital inventory
-Why 31% of labor hours at cashiering can be redeployed elsewhere Scaling innovation across nine retail banners in 2026
🎧 Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more retail tech insights!
#retailinnovation #smartstores #retailai #grocerytech #omnitalk #singaporeretail #visionai #frictionlessretail #retailtech #fairpricegroup #storeoftomorrow #retailpodcast
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Transcripts
Hello, everyone.
Speaker A:This is Omnitalk Retail.
Speaker A:I'm Chris Walton.
Speaker B:And I'm Amazinga.
Speaker A: he Vuzion Booth, booth number: Speaker A:And joining us today is someone I'm very excited to bring to our omnitalk audience, and it's a man who was with us before.
Speaker A:We interviewed him once last year.
Speaker A:And that is Vipul Chawla, the CEO of Fair Price Group.
Speaker A:Vipul, welcome back to omnitalk.
Speaker A:It's great to have you.
Speaker C:Thank you, Chris.
Speaker C:Good to see you again.
Speaker C:Good to see you again.
Speaker C:And it's wonderful to see you guys after the last time we met at the cg.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:Well, Vipul, for those who are just meeting you and Fair Price Group for the first time, would you mind just giving us a quick overview for our, especially our US audience what Fair Price Group is and all of you oversee in your role as CEO?
Speaker C:Absolutely.
Speaker C:So we are from Singapore, a small island in Asia.
Speaker C:We run and help support a company called the Fair Price Group.
Speaker C:It's an omnichannel retailer.
Speaker C:So we've got a physical stores, we've got our digital e commerce stores, we've got an own brand, private label portfolio, a loyalty system, and a food services business.
Speaker C:So it's really everything food kind of enterprise that we serve our customers with.
Speaker B:And where are the stores again?
Speaker C:In Singapore.
Speaker B:All in Singapore.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker C:Largely in Singapore.
Speaker C:We have a few outside, but largely Singapore.
Speaker C:Okay.
Speaker C:Okay.
Speaker A:All right.
Speaker A:So last time we talked to you at the Consumer Goods Forum, you piqued our interest because you mentioned that you had a Store of Tomorrow initiative that was about to launch.
Speaker C:Yes.
Speaker A:So I'm curious, what can you tell us about that?
Speaker A:You know, where is it at in terms of how's it going, how far it's been implemented, and what kind of digital technologies are on display in the Store of Tomorrow, my friend.
Speaker C:So when we met in June, we were building the Store of Tomorrow and we said we would open it.
Speaker C:So we launched it in August of last year.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker C:So it's been up and running for about five months, which we're excited about.
Speaker C:And in this store, we were really trying to address points of customer frame friction that you see.
Speaker C:So when you go shopping for grocery or for anything for that matter, the first thing that you're trying to remember is what's my shopping list?
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:So that's the point of friction.
Speaker C:The second is when you're in a store where Do I find it?
Speaker C:Which aisle?
Speaker C:Where's the product?
Speaker C:The third is certainly for my Singaporean customers.
Speaker C:Whether they want the product or not, they never want to miss an offer.
Speaker A:Okay, all right, Good to know the.
Speaker C:Third point of friction.
Speaker C:And the fourth is no one wants to wait too long at checkout.
Speaker C:Okay.
Speaker A:Oh, okay.
Speaker A:Interesting.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:So in the store of tomorrow, when you enter and you pick up your shopping trolley, when you scan the Fair Price app, it lets us know who you are as a customer.
Speaker C:So the trolley puts up a shopping assistant on something that looks like an iPad and says, this could be the shopping list for you.
Speaker C:So that's the first.
Speaker C:Your shopping list is kind of auto generated in terms of recommendations.
Speaker C:The second thing that if you press a button saying I want to buy, say eggs, it will navigate you to where the eggs are in the store like a maps.
Speaker C:And as you get in front of the eggs, the electronic shelf label will blink saying, you've arrived.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:So you find the eggs.
Speaker C:But when you're walking through the store, if there's an offer on Fuji apples, you will know there's an offer on apples to your right or to your left whether you want to buy apples or not.
Speaker C:But you should at least do the.
Speaker C:There's an option now when you put the eggs in the, in the trolley, it'll also ask you, do you want to buy bread, butter, milk, etc.
Speaker C:And if you say yes, then we'll help you find where they are in the store.
Speaker C:And once you've put all that stuff in the trolley, you can leave, we're done.
Speaker C:You do not have to go back to checkout again, really.
Speaker C:So we are addressing the four points of friction, which is the shopping list, where to find the product, don't want to miss an offer, and of course, so from a customer journey standpoint, what we're really doing is helping personalize your shopping journey, helping personalize the offers we get to you, and then making sure that the checkout is seamless.
Speaker B:Well, it certainly seems like you've got that customer journey completely ironed out from a fair price perspective.
Speaker B:But I have to know, what are your customers saying?
Speaker B:What has the customer feedback been so far since you opened this store?
Speaker B:Were back in August.
Speaker C:So, you know, initially, of course, the customers were surprised to have, you know, like some of our traditional customers were a bit anxious saying, whoa, how does this work?
Speaker C:But here's the thing.
Speaker C:A few months into the launch, the purchase basket in these stores has increased by 70, 80%.
Speaker C:Wow.
Speaker C:Which is interesting.
Speaker C:So we're not Having to buy bigger trolleys because the whole.
Speaker C:And why is that happening?
Speaker C:Because the level of engagement has suddenly changed, right?
Speaker C:Because now I don't have to worry about remembering my list, tracking an offer or worry about queuing a checkout, etc.
Speaker C:So the whole frictionless experience seems to have driven the purchase basket.
Speaker C:The customer NPS has dramatically improved and my store staff is a lot happier because they don't keep getting stopped by, hey, listen, where can I find those apples?
Speaker C:Where can I find those oranges?
Speaker C:That's kind of helping you.
Speaker C:So it's doing better than we thought so far.
Speaker C:Fingers crossed.
Speaker C:When I meet you next, I'll report back to see what's working and what's not working.
Speaker B:Vipal, how did you prepare your customers for this new store?
Speaker B:I mean, maybe tell us a little bit about that too.
Speaker B:Just like, you know, you said that the staff likes it better, but what was kind of the prep when day one, they walked in the store so they knew how to shop this store the right way.
Speaker C:So the first thing that we did was we opened the store in the digital district of Singapore.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker C:So it was in a sense, you know, everything in that, in that district is just front end in terms of the digital initiatives of the country, a bit like equivalent of our own Silicon Valley.
Speaker C:So customers engaging with any level of enterprise in that part of Singapore know there will be something new potentially from a tech standpoint, that was one.
Speaker C:Secondly, it's a slightly younger cohort of population, so they're a little more open to some of these changes.
Speaker C:And the third is that as they entered our store, we did have some level of engagement just helping them with this is all the new stuff in the store and you may want to access it, right?
Speaker A:Vip, I'm curious too.
Speaker A:It sounds like you all took and we espoused this approach, a very experience design based approach.
Speaker A:You looked at the whole collection of technologies you wanted to put in the store to create the store and the expression that you wanted.
Speaker A:You didn't try them out and say, hey, you can do this if you want to.
Speaker A:But to that point, did you try some of these solutions out in other environments before you went to the experience design route or how was the approach?
Speaker A:What did you do?
Speaker C:So prior to the opening of this store, we tested virtually each one of these technologies individually in other stores because we wanted to make sure that it's stable.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker C:And we also wanted to make sure that the technology talks to each other because you got a bunch of things I talked about four we've Got another half a dozen initiatives in that store and we might talk a little bit about that today.
Speaker C:But to get all of that to talk to each other in a way that the customer experience is no longer clunky is the testing that we did prior to opening the store that makes more sense.
Speaker A:I wish I had this store.
Speaker A:When I was looking for toothpicks the other day, I couldn't find toothpicks in the store.
Speaker A:And the way you're describing it would have saved me about five or 10 minutes of my life.
Speaker A:I would have gotten five or 10 minutes of my life back.
Speaker C:Come to Singapore.
Speaker A:I'm gonna have to.
Speaker A:I don't know that the time trade offs there with the travel, but I'd love to come to Singapore anytime.
Speaker B:Vipul, I'd love to dive more into one thing that you mentioned earlier.
Speaker B:You said our store employees are much happier because they're not being stopped every couple of minutes in between tasks to tell people where something is.
Speaker B:People can have self service now, it sounds like on these carts.
Speaker B:But what was important for you in terms of digital innovation from a team member side or from your employee side as you were thinking about building this out and how do you, especially when you bring AI into some of these experiences, like how are you preparing your teams to really feel like this is going to be one.
Speaker B:We're all one team, like the technology, us as associates, we're all going to be serving the customer in the best way.
Speaker B:Tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker C:Great question.
Speaker C:You know, the customer experience will never exceed that of your own team member.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker C:So if the team.
Speaker A:That's right.
Speaker A:I remember you said that before.
Speaker C:Experience.
Speaker C:How can the customer have a good, good one?
Speaker C:So in preparation for some of the technologies that I described at the back end, we've got a few things that are working which are driven by AI.
Speaker C:One is something called a Grocer Genie where every store manager on their smartphone.
Speaker C:You don't need to.
Speaker C:On your own smartphone, we have a Grocer Genie which tells you everything that's happening in the store.
Speaker C:Your product, your sales, your historical trends, your sales to date, including, by the way, what you can anticipate happening this afternoon and tomorrow.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:So that's something that's constantly being powered on your phone.
Speaker C:The second is we've got something called Vision AI.
Speaker C:So we have cameras all over the store, the standard cameras that any store has.
Speaker C:But behind them we now put a technology called Vision AI, which helps.
Speaker C:Initially the thought was to help our stores in identifying where we're running out of stock, if there's a spillage on the floor, if a customer is struggling with something, this will prompt you.
Speaker C:But here's the interesting thing, because it's a learning model.
Speaker C:And on the first day that we opened the store, we had a customer who walked in and picked up an apple and put it on her backpack.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:So it was an unusual moment.
Speaker C:Didn't put it in the trolley, put it in the backpack.
Speaker C:And the Vision AI sent a prompt to the storm, and they're saying that was an unusual movement.
Speaker C:We had not programmed the AI for pilferage, but it just said that was an unusual moment.
Speaker C:I think you should check it out.
Speaker C:So that's the kind of stuff that's going behind the network to prepare our stores to interact and deal with our customers.
Speaker A:Vip, I'm curious, was there anything else that surprised you in terms of seeing the store in action?
Speaker A:Because the one thing that has struck me in this conversation which you allude to, you know, a few minutes ago, was the prevalence or the desire of the customers to kind of use self checkout in the way that you described it, which over here in the States, we haven't really seen that type of idea take off.
Speaker A:There hasn't been a great proclivity by the US consumer to want to do that.
Speaker A:So I'm curious if you could touch on that.
Speaker A:But also, if anything else surprised you or maybe that was it.
Speaker C:No.
Speaker C:So what's interesting for us is that in this store, we are now seeing 82% of our transactions are through either the trolley, through self checkout or through scan and go.
Speaker C:Wow.
Speaker C:So not using the physical cashiering checkout process now.
Speaker A:82%.
Speaker C:82%.
Speaker C:Now, why is that important not just for us, but also for the United States or for all developed markets where cost of labor is an issue.
Speaker C:When we looked at our own numbers, 31% of our labor hours are at cashiering.
Speaker C:Okay, Right.
Speaker C:So when you eliminate 80% of that, let's say 4/5 of that, you can redeploy the cash sharing hours into doing something else.
Speaker C:And this is fun, it is interactive, it is easy.
Speaker C:And the best part was that customers young and old seem to be adopting to this.
Speaker C:And that surprised me.
Speaker A:Interesting.
Speaker C:Even the, shall I say the more what we call the silver or the pioneer generation in Singapore was saying, you know what?
Speaker C:This is?
Speaker C:Okay, we can work with this.
Speaker C:So that has surprised me a bit.
Speaker B:Vipul, as you think about expanding this concept into other store locations, will that stay the same?
Speaker B:Or like, what are Your thoughts based on this first store in this very early adopter, high tech ready consumer space, and then how that will look as you translated that into other locations.
Speaker C:So I'll address that in a second.
Speaker C:There's one other thing I forgot to describe it, which is the whole endless aisle concept that we have in the store.
Speaker C:So you can walk into the store and look at, let's say baby socks from Korea, let's say, right, you can touch and feel them, but when you scan your phone, it can also show you 10,000 other variants of those baby socks sitting at our warehouse.
Speaker C:And based on what you've seen, you can press a button and we'll deliver it home to you.
Speaker C:So that's where we got the physical and the digital sort of channel moving together.
Speaker C:Similarly for wine and so on and so forth, you can pick a bottle of wine and we'll ship 12 or 24 of them to your home.
Speaker C:So as we are bringing all of these technologies together, some are obviously working better than others.
Speaker C:But the plan for this year is to now scale these into the country into a few specific banners.
Speaker C:We have nine different banners.
Speaker C:We're going to scale certainly the trolley, we're going to scale the electronic shelf label, we're going to scale the vision AI, we're going to scale the grocer genie, we're going to scale the endless aisle into a very significant part of our business in the next 12 months.
Speaker A:So you bring up so many interesting topics.
Speaker A:So based on the fact that you also said that Singaporeans like a deal and you have endless aisle too, does that mean that the marketplace becomes a.
Speaker A:Do you have a marketplace online or does that become a bigger part of your strategy as well?
Speaker C:We do have a marketplace online and one of the interesting things that the data in the store told us was that we had this endless aisle located in a certain part of the store.
Speaker C:As customers were walking through the store, the data and analytics told us if you move it to one aisle to the left, the customers will stop for longer.
Speaker C:So we did that.
Speaker C:And indeed it's playing out so this whole which is now being driven by AI, but it's more about the AI experiences and the data and the analytics I think can be extremely powerful for customer engagement.
Speaker C:Awesome.
Speaker A:Awesome, man.
Speaker A:Love when you stop by.
Speaker A:Learned so much from you.
Speaker A:Thank you so much for your time.
Speaker A:Thank you so much.
Speaker A:And we'll be back with All Day Long and tomorrow as well and on Tuesday.
Speaker A:So until next time.
Speaker B:Ann, be careful out there.