[Lincoln Blaire] Schnucks is a regional grocery store. We have 120 stores, mostly in the St. Louis metro area, but also in Wisconsin and Northern Illinois, Southern Illinois, and Indiana.
[Liz Spengemann] We offer all the basics of the grocery store, but our focus is on fresh. So, we pride ourselves on fresh and customer service.
[Dave Steck] I’ve been with Schnucks for about five years. Really involved in doing innovative things in the stores now. We have 15 robots in our stores, which we're kind of leading the industry on what we're doing in innovation. Through time that I'd spent in the stores, we're doing something called CTC, which is Commitment To Customer. I would walk the store, talk to the teammates. They were having to do manual logs eight times a day.
[Liz Spengemann] Every department had to have a teammate that had a manual paper log with the manual temp gun. And you would go from case to case, take the temp, put it on a manual sheet.
[Dave Steck] We're doing it eight times a day, so it's taking eight hours a day for them to complete this task. And in some cases, you hate to say it, but you know they're not doing it, and they're writing numbers down on the temp log to say they were. So, that's why we brought you in, we brought one other vendor in as well, with a different solution that was a much larger device that was in the coolers. It wasn't going to be certified for food safety. That's why we went with SmartSense. We piloted both vendors, and SmartSense was the clear winner.
[Lincoln Blaire] If we had an issue, we had to dig through those logs. It was a very manual process. But with SmartSense, we're able to go on the dashboard, and we're able to verify that the products stayed at a specific temperature. And if the case was down, that we can prove that the product was safe.
[Dave Steck] Your accuracy by going to an IoT device just goes through the roof. You know that it's being done. You don't have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about detracting from what the teammates have to do to take care of customers. I think the easiest way to say that it's providing value is, right off the bat, how many problems that we're finding in the stores that we didn't know existed. We found some cases that just weren't operating up to par, even though the old system was reporting that it was within operating guidelines, and they were not producing the results that were expected from those cases.
[Liz Spengemann] So, I went from being, like, the biggest naysayer to, you know, I love what this has done for my business. I mean, it's minutes a day that I'm spending as opposed to hours a day.
[Lincoln Blaire] Long term, this solution is going to save us a lot of money and provide our customers with a much, much better food choice.