SAN ANTONIO — Food Lion is using 120 overlapping cameras in two lab stores to track and analyze each consumer transaction from the point they enter the store until they make their purchase, Rick Anicetti, chief executive officer of Delhaize America Shared Services, told attendees at the IRI 2010 Reinventing CPG & Retail Summit here Tuesday.

"Loyalty card data will not tell me which aisle the customer went down and whether they made the transaction they intended to or not," he said. "It seems the only way we're going to understand how a customer begins to make the kind of transaction we're talking about is to follow them around the entire store, which seems impossible, but the answer to that are the two lab stores."

In addition to the cameras, Food Lion is leveraging a sophisticated type of facial recognition software, Anicetti said.

A sign posted in each store lets shoppers know that Food Lion is conducting market research that uses video cameras, Rajeev Sharma, founder and CEO of VideoMining Corp., Food Lion's technology provider, told SN.

To ensure adequate sample size, Food Lion will install the equipment in two additional stores by year's end. By October it will have mapped 600,000 customer transactions.

"We can attach that to transaction data, which attaches to loyalty card data, which attaches to segmentation clustering and trip mission analysis and insights," Anicetti said.

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