GetGo Redefines the Consumer Experience in Convenience with Cooler Screens

GetGo Café + Market, a food-first convenience store chain owned and operated by Giant Eagle Inc., puts the consumer at the center of its business. GetGo lives by the motto: “Better. Believe It.” GetGo has built its company with a strategic focus on utilizing technology to make the consumer experience as frictionless as possible. The company’s tech investments have focused on helping GetGo reimagine the future of Convenience-store food and beverage retailing.  

GetGo and Cooler Screens share the vision that digital merchandising and contextually-relevant promotional messaging are a perfect fit with the on-the-go and impulse-driven nature of convenience store consumers. As the world’s largest in-store digital retail media and merchandising platform, Cooler Screens partners with retailers, like GetGo, to transform traditional cooler doors into digital smart screens which seamlessly integrate into the existing retail environment.  

Together, GetGo and Cooler Screens set out to transform the in-store experience bringing what consumers love about shopping online to GetGo’s high-traffic cooler beverage aisles. The objectives were to improve the consumer experience, increase same-store sales, and bring innovation and a modern feel to GetGo stores.  

GetGo consumers benefited from instantly and easily accessing the most relevant and up-to-date information – just like when they are shopping online – allowing them to make faster and better purchasing decisions. Across the store and when approaching the aisle, consumers see full door, contextually relevant brand stories which increases brand awareness and consideration. When consumers approach the coolers - their “moment of truth” – immediately before making a purchase, the display switches to a planogram, providing product, pricing, promotions, and nutritional information allowing them to make an informed decision. 

Cooler Screens’ digital merchandising and advertising content is powered by modules running in Microsoft’s Azure IoT Edge runtime. The Azure IoT Edge runtime also enables Cooler Screens to communicate and manage the edge devices contained in each cooler door. Cooler Screens leverages data and analytics capabilities such as Power BI along with Azure Synapse to better measure the effectiveness of the contextually relevant digital merchandising and advertising. 

The GetGo and Cooler Screens partnership, utilizing Microsoft technology, resulted in GetGo increasing same store sales, improving the consumer experience, and utilizing insights to drive operational improvements. 

Sales Impact

• 4.9% incremental same-store sales lift for beverages, driven by soft drinks, coffee, and energy 
• 4.4% growth in beverage transactions in digital stores vs non-digital stores 

Consumer Experience

• 82-86% of consumers had a positive experience with the digital cooler doors and said the doors made it easier to find sales items

Insights 

• Real-time out–of-stock reporting allowed GetGo to monitor out-of-stocks at a brand and store level
• Insights from out-of-stock data identified peak-period supply issue which GetGo was able to address with the supplier
  
  

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