[Matt Bunker] Lowes Foods is a regional grocery operator in the southeast. We were founded in 1954 in a little town called North Wilkesboro, North Carolina. We've since expanded into both of the Carolinas and now Georgia.
[Mellisa King] At Lowes Foods, our mission is to grow community. When you think about what are your most special moments in life, they're often centered around a table where you come together and you eat food.
[Darrice Monk] We want our own children and grandchildren to have safe foods and safe product. We want to walk in and buy something out of a case or off of a shelf and be confident that we don't have to worry about foodborne illness.
[Mellisa King] We are an organization that in order to serve more communities, we’ve got to continue to grow and expand. So that is a priority for us and continues to be a priority for us this year. Then obviously, having an entertainment company that just happens to intersect at selling groceries is important to us. When you come into Lowes Foods, we want to have the best products. But when you leave here, we want you to feel something that's more than just this is a grocery store.
[Darrice Monk] You're like we are. And you're putting your guests first. You're wanting to drive sales, but the safety is a number one priority.
[Matt Bunker] Lowes Foods is an innovator, and we strive to make sure that we have all of the latest in technologies to ensure that we reduce friction in the workplace for our leadership teams. One of our biggest challenges was to figure out how to engage all of the other operating support partners within our company structure. So, breaking down those pre-built silos.
[Mellisa King] So we need our people interacting with our guests 1 on 1. And so we look for ways that technology can help us be more efficient so that our people can be front faced, interacting with our guests to provide the experience that we need. So we were looking for a retail tool that could help us maintain safety, a tool that was friendly because we don't necessarily think of technology being friendly, but we like this to go out and we're sourcing something that was simple to use for our host. Was it efficient , right? Did it help us go out and get the information that we needed and can we react on it quickly? And then something that wasn't really intrusive to our guests. They weren't going to see this massive technology thing being introduced to our grocery stores that took away from really the product being the hero. Well, I would say that we considered 4 or 5 different solutions. At the end of the day, it's kind of like similar to buying a car, right? You go out to a car dealership, this car dealership has this car and it, you know, it has this aspect that you want. And then you go to the next one and then there's an aspect here that you want. What we considered SmartSense, it really was a solution that we can drive off the lot and had everything that we were looking for to accomplish inside of our source.
[Darrice Monk] Are you willing to piecemeal and get a program or software from one source, sensors from another source? Maybe have to pay somebody else to do monitoring? If that works for you or you've got existing systems, fine. For us, we needed one stop shopping with the responsibility for all aspects to be in one vendor.
[Matt Bunker] The other solution providers in some form or another met some of the criteria that we were looking for, but the SmartSense solution was the only one that really gave us the full suite of solutions that we were seeking.
[Darrice Monk] SmartSense is that one vendor that is there to support us in the hardware, in the software, as well as in what we need, be it reporting, timeliness, who needs to be involved. And in the course of a couple of texts or a phone call, no more than an email, we can resolve an issue to tweak and fine tune what we need as a company to be successful.
[Matt Bunker] It was not close. SmartSense was the solution for us.
[Mellisa King] I think we all had this idea that it was just going be temperature-related, we were going to able to track our food, make sure that we were utilizing it in a safety precaution. This has evolved for us in so many ways. Everything from recently having power outages to be able to be very strategic and saying, okay, here's an asset inside of our store that we need to react to quickly, to utilizing it for hurricane reaction, to be able to utilize it for, you know, facilities management.
[Bryan Saulpaugh] SmartSense has helped me have all of my temperatures on one device, right in my hand. Anytime I'm at the store, at home, I can monitor the whole store. I can monitor every temperature in the store. Any food safety issues that we're going to have or we may have, I'll be alerted to before we even get to a point where we have a food safety concern. It also helps me monitor and that's a huge one, food quality. I want to ensure we don't undercook anything, but I also want to ensure we don't overcook anything.
[Mellisa King] Protection has now really evolved in so many facets across our organization all the way to the quality of our food. We've actually really appreciated the guidance from the team to say we've done this a little bit before, let's take some learnings. We've learned in other rollouts and been able to tweak it and continue to get better at the same time working very closely with our team. Quite honestly, like I said, we're learning about our assets. Our asset health is actually better than we anticipated. And so the rollout has really just been best in class.
[Matt Bunker] We did all that in 12 weeks. We had a pretty aggressive goal of having multiple stores a day and sometimes, you know, 10 a week that we rolled out. Our AP team was able to follow around and train stores as they were being rolled out. But then the customer success team at SmartSense also came down, and then we followed that up with teams trainings for all the locations as they were on boarding. It took roughly 2 to 3 weeks of tuning to make sure that all of the sensors were monitoring the assets accurately and that our behaviors of our assets were being calculated in the artificial intelligence engine, so that when we started alerting, we alerted on real events. SmartSense is able to assist us enterprise-wide by allowing us to see asset health reporting that gives us an insight into which of our refrigerated assets are performing at the optimum temperatures and at the optimum efficiencies, and then which assets are not performing at those efficiencies. That gives us a head start on addressing potential causes of refrigeration breakdowns before they actually become a breakdown. We've seen improvement in things like, simple things like closing cooler doors and shutting down cases when they don't need to be running. Really great examples of energy efficiencies within the business that we had not captured that we're now capturing with SmartSense.
[Mellisa King] This system and the sensors themselves are pretty much invisible so that the guests will even not even know that there's something going on and that that they're being protected, right? And then, of course, efficiency. I mean, the system, you get real-time information right at your fingertips when you need it so that you can react in a really quick and swift manner if you have any issues.
[Darrice Monk] We're not waiting for some company to call us with an alarm. It's on our tablets. It's on our phones. And so we take better care of our communities as SmartSense helps to take care of us.
[Mellisa King] SmartSense has actually saved us quite a few times in just the recent weeks around product, whether at our KJ store where we've had SmartSense go off and alert us to the fact that we had temperatures rising inside of our stores, where 3am, a store director shows up and goes, well, we don't have any power in the building.
[Matt Bunker] Every point of data that comes out of the SmartSense technology, we can respond faster. We can get into the stores quicker. We can get our SOPs in place much sooner than we were able to before. This gives us a valuable head start on saving all the products that have been maybe exposed to a temperature abuse event.
[Mellisa King] The system is just easy to use. I'm talking all the way from the rollout, you know, building the relationship back with the SmartSense teams and really getting what we need out of it all the way to the use of the app, the digital probes, and you know, the friendliness is just incredible. When we think about training today's workforce, right, and turnover and what's going on and happening in our stores, it's really important that we design training solutions as well as, you know, the types of items that we're training on. They need to be incredibly efficient. And so just the training was very quick, very easy.
[Matt Bunker] What I would tell others about SmartSense is that SmartSense is a provider that's flexible. They're a perfect partner for us in that they provide the kind of support and resources that we need to run our businesses more effectively. This is a program that I think that was way overdue for our business. And now that we are in it, I think they're an invaluable resource.
[Mellisa King] You know, one of the things that we think about when we're rolling something out is, you know, how much time are we going to have to invest? What resources are we going to have to invest? And this program with SmartSense, the partnership that we have with the team has just been incredible. And I would say certainly, SmartSense needs to be on the top of your list of solutions.
[Matt Bunker] SmartSense really fits our culture because we're focused on our people.
We're focused on reducing friction in the environments that we operate in, and we're also concerned with building sales. SmartSense reduces friction by taking manual processes away that we can automate. It also makes our people really important by giving them more data to use to run their stores effectively. And we build sales by predicting and then eliminating potential loss events with refrigeration failures and keeping product on the shelf where it belongs.
[Darrice Monk] SmartSense has put a smile back on some folks' faces that I had not seen in a long time because they realize it's there to make them better, it's there to protect them and the guests. Protecting them protects the brand, protects their jobs and their longevity. So, I would say that SmartSense has been an integral piece of late to help put the smiles back on faces that have done the same job day in and day out, but now have a better way to do it. If you want somebody to support your business in every way that it needs from the technology piece, SmartSense is the best choice, and I would say take a look at them first rather than last.
[Mellisa King] I don't think that we anticipated the quality of life that this was going to bring back to some of our leadership inside of our store, right? Getting that call at 3am in the morning that you've got a refrigeration issue and not necessarily even knowing what that refrigeration is. Now you can be laser focused. You have complete and full trust that this system is telling you the thing that is broken. Do you need to respond immediately? Is it something that's not a 911? Is it something that you were aware of ? Can you imagine our our hosts not having to wake up on Christmas day and go do refrigeration checks because they simply have what's going on inside of their stores on an app. There is no amount of money that you can anticipate on the happiness of your hosts inside of your stores and the people that are using this. It's really been a game changer for us.
