Bon Preu carries out the first “Smart Food” workshop with consumers

Bon Preu carries out the first “Smart Food” workshop with consumers

Bon Preu Group, as actor of the last stage of the food chain, is particularly involved in smart food awareness to contribute to better inform consumers about food products. Currently, there is a lack of information concerning products that we buy and eat, whether by poor communication of existing information or a lack of technology to gather and communicate this information throughout the chain sourcing. At this stage, the pilot “Tailored Information for Consumers” is getting developed with the aim to meet consumers’ requirements regarding their need of information about food products that can be found at the supermarket.Feedback from end users (consumers) is a key point to assess viability and compliance with their expectations. In this sense, a plan for consumer involvement has been defined within this pilot consisting of three workshops with a group of Bon Preu customers who wish to participate in the project:

  • 1st Workshop: Introduction to the project and evaluation of what product information consumer would like to know and how consumer wants to get this information.
  • 2nd Workshop: Experimentation with a mock-up model at Bonpreu’s “Consumer’ space” with a specific group of products and with the focus group of consumers, in order to validate the technology and to improve it according focus group proposals.
  • 3rd Workshop: Final test with a real prototype model at Bonpreu’s “Consumer’ space”, with feedback from the focus group and validation for deployment in one of Bonpreu supermarket.

Last 25th of April the first “Smart Food” workshop was held at Bonpreu “Consumer’ space” with a group of 20 consumers. The session was structured in three parts where firstly an introduction to the SmartAgriFood project and an analysis of the current situation was done, then the focus group was organised by teams that played different games to let them discuss about the following aspects: “what would you like to know about products that you can find at a supermarket?”; “do you think that there is currently a lack of information concerning food products?”; “how would you like to access to this information?”. Finally, each team shared their proposals.Concerning this first workshop, the main conclusions have been that more than a 50% of the consumers ignore the existence and the meaning of a big amount of logos and signs in front of a 19% of the participants that usually take them into account while choosing a product. It resulted that the attributes that interest the most to the focus group were the origin of the product, additives and gluten content, organic products, animal welfare and sustainable packaging. Concerning how consumers would like to get this information, they currently opt for smart gadgets such as mobile scanners, trolley screens and Smartphone which could show them the attributes in a fast and easy way.Finally, it is worth to say that the group showed a high interest in taking part in the “Tailored Information for Consumers” pilot.

SmartAgriFood is funded by the EU Seventh Framework Programme under the FI.ICT-2011.1.8 Work Programme