Carrying a torch

Good lighting, along with good store design and merchandising can enhance the shopping experience.

That did not take long.

It appears that LED is now the preferred choice for many lighting applications in grocery today, displacing mainstays such as incandescent, fluorescent and neon. As retailers have discovered, the drawbacks of these formerly popular lighting choices often outweighed the good.

Enter LED. The plethora of features and options available with LED are among the reasons why retailers cannot help but fall in love with lighting again, say industry observers.

The two most often cited reasons retailers give for switching over to LED are the formats’ ability to drive energy and keep costs down while helping achieve energy code compliance. LED also opens up new design opportunities, especially within smaller footprint stores, while offering a relatively fast ROI.

Store merchandisers and operations personnel are also becoming more involved in making decisions regarding the type of lighting for their stores and are pushing for more LEDs. “These individuals understand that proper lighting drives sales and the balance required between saving energy and making sure that the look and feel of a lighting upgrade has a positive impact on the shopping experience,” says Bruce Schneider, sales specialist, merchandising lighting with Hussmann, based in Bridgeton, Mo.

Expanding the role lighting plays, beyond offering uniform illumination, has led to many retail lighting changes, say observers. Store merchandisers want product displays to be vivid, natural colors to be seen and displays to pop, something LED helps them achieve. “Lighting is about attracting the shopper’s attention, guiding them to a specific product or destination within the store and influencing them to purchase,” says Schneider. “At Hussmann we believe lighting can be used as a differentiator in every refrigerated case lineup, turning them all into ‘destination departments.’”

LED versatility is also a factor in its increasing popularity and why it is rapidly displacing Ceramic Metal Halide for accent and high bay lighting. Scott Roos, vice president, product design for the Juno Lighting Group, based in Des Plaines, Ill., says above and beyond the drive to lower energy and operating costs, grocers are turning to LEDs to assist in creating more of an upscale, boutique appearance in their stores, especially in the higher profile (and higher margin) perimeter areas including produce, wine, floral, bakery, deli as well as feature end-caps.

Recent examples of this, says Roos, include the Nugget Market in Sacramento, Calif., where track lighting is effectively used to highlight key areas in the store and Avril Supermarché Santé in Quebec, which uses LED high bay lighting in concert with stretched fabric banners to create a crisp, modern appearance along with track lighting to selectively provide greater focus on feature displays.

“LED offers almost unlimited upgrades for all lighting needs,” says Fritz Meyne, vice president of sales for the Bitro Group, based in Hackensack, N.J. Among the primary advantages of LED, says Meyne, are easy dimming and control options, narrow to wide beam applications, close LED proximity to foods and close public contact with no heat issues at point of contact. LEDs also have reduced costs of ownership and reduced power consumption. Meyne adds that while some LED options might cost more initially, LED ROI offers true savings for retailers.

Observers say that from a purely technological perspective, LED is by far the driving force within the lighting industry today. As recently as two years ago LED was considered a premature lighting technology that would have limited use in supermarket applications because of its poor performance compared to traditional lighting technologies. That has view has clearly changed.

“Good supermarket lighting is much more than light level and energy consumption,” says Jake Summers, director, specialty markets for ConTech Lighting, based in Northbrook, Ill. “The contrast between brilliantly illuminated areas next to darker ones creates a more enticing environment, which can be achieved with the right lighting application.”

Glaring differences

Glare control is also becoming a priority for retailers. Summers says retailers are using decorative products to create a more attractive and familiar environment that makes customers comfortable so they linger and buy more in specialty departments, freezer spaces, and even at checkout. To help retailers achieve their goals and lighting objectives, ConTech Lighting works with them through all stages of their projects.

“Today, with technology improving at such a rapid pace and light fixture manufacturers’ accelerated learning curve on the engineering of dedicated LED fixtures—LED can now be used throughout most departments of a supermarket,” says Summers.

Some observers say making assumptions that all LED systems offer similar features is faulty thinking. They add that today’s LED lighting must offer more than energy savings or serve as a spotlight for products—it must act as part of a merchandising solution. Officials at Allendale, N.J.-based Henschel-Steinau say qualities such as solar compatibility, smart analytics and low maintenance and operating costs may soon be standard. “It is a misnomer that all LED illumination systems are created equal,” says Patty Pellegrin, director of marketing for Henschel-Steinau. “As part of our mission to create impactful in-store solutions for our retailer partners, today’s lighting should be designed to measurably improve performance and reduce costs, while increasing sales.”

Observers say that while retailers have a grasp on the multi-faceted role lighting can play in a store’s overall appearance the need to be fiscally responsible remains. Finding that equilibrium between the need to standout and not going overboard financially is something many retailers are struggling with today. For some retailers, it is easier to justify the payback on standout lighting in higher margin perimeter areas compared to center store where lower margin commodities are shelved and where lighting is still dominated by linear fluorescents.

Observers do say that linear fluorescent technology has seen meaningful improvements in service life and performance over the past few years and is effective in providing a general spread of light from low to medium ceiling heights. In the end, however, they say striking a balance between cost and appearance requires a lighting design that takes into account construction and operating costs in context with the image that the store, and different areas within the store, are trying to project.

“Reasonable initial costs and low energy and maintenance costs do not need to be mutually exclusive from great design,” says Roos. “For example, when you create a more boutique-like appearance, you generally reduce the overall ambient light levels so that products are illuminated with accent lighting to ‘pop’ more. This reduces the energy footprint, especially so today, since accent lighting is more commonly accomplished by using highly energy efficient LED fixtures.”

Increasingly, officials at Bitro are seeing the need for lighting requirements in smaller footprints. Meyne notes that with the advent of LED the return depths for illuminated channel letters can now be as shallow as .75 inches, something that was not possible with neon. He says this also means illuminated letters can now be used for high-end retail point of purchase applications where the signage size does not over power the product.

Shining a spotlight

Allura LED lighting is now available from Southern Imperial. It is presented in a variety of styles from flexible strips and rigid strips for accent lighting to overhead gondola lighting and more. With its heritage in fixture manufacturing, Southern Imperial can also create custom lighting fixtures for any display need with custom color temperatures, lengths, lumens and power supplies also available, say company officials. “For years Southern Imperial has provided lighting solutions to retailers and we are excited about this new opportunity to bring affordable, high-quality lighting solutions to more customers,” says Stan Valiulis, CEO of the Rockford, Ill.-based company.

Valiulis says LED’s ability to provide a high color-rendering index to accurately present the colors in merchandise packaging is unrivaled. “Our new LED line is ideal for adding product lighting in a variety of ways to areas like health and beauty and high impulse categories. LED solutions such as ours are low voltage and provide a reduction of energy costs, as well as a reduction of labor costs since bulbs no longer need to be replaced, providing great value to retailers,” he says.

Henschel-Steinau introduced its LumaNEXT at GlobalShop 2015 in March under its HS Illumination division. Company officials say features of LumaNEXT plug-and-play, low voltage LED system include simple installation and maintenance, improved lighting, energy efficiency, intelligent sensors for daylight harvesting, analytics and lower costs to operate. Centralized Power Stations connected to control devices can be strategically located throughout a store to deliver 24-Volt DC current to as many as two-dozen system devices. These include overhead solid state lighting, vertical graphic banner luminaires, suspended illuminated signs, illuminated perimeter wall displays, track lighting and other back-lit merchandising displays.

According to Pellegrin, LumaNEXT is the first low voltage illumination solution that requires no transformer or ballast at the fixture level, streamlining installation and significantly reducing the need for costly, periodic maintenance. “Compared to other LED lighting solutions, LumaNEXT can reduce operating costs associated with lighting by 25% or more,” she says.

Juno Lighting Group recently launched higher lumen track fixtures that company officials say are one-for-one replacements for 70-watt ceramic metal halide fixtures. The Juno Trac-Master Wall Wash LED T259L flood fixture is designed to economically spread a wide pattern of light over a large display area and can be rotated off axis for complete aiming flexibility. The Juno Conix II T267L Trac is designed to provide efficacies and beam control for accent lighting. Juno officials also launched a new high performance, modestly priced AccuLite H1 LED High Bay series that provides efficient, attractive general lighting and up to 24,000 lumens per fixture for higher ceiling areas.

New products from Bitro Group include a wide selection of optics/beam angle enhanced LEDs for reducing material costs and increased performance as well as new power supply and control options for white light and RGB. According to Meyne, the company recently introduced a redundancy controller option to save on future service costs where the actual site service might cause increased support costs. “We also introduced a newer line of wall washers and linear LED fixtures for indirect and flood lighting in two footprints,” he says.

ConTech Lighting is introducing its next generation of integral LED track heads—the O3. The O3 utilizes the newest LED chip from Nichia, which is available in four different wattage/lumen packages with efficacies surpassing 100 lumens per watt. The four lumen packages, which will provide enough punch at mounting heights from 9 feet to 18 feet-plus, coupled with color temperature and numerous beam spread options makes this an ideal track lighting option for a whole host of various supermarket applications.   

This year Hussmann will be working closely with retailers to demonstrate how ambient, accent and in-case lighting can work together to create store environments that easily attract shoppers and pull them toward each destination department. Hussmann has introduced its EcoShine II Quick Connect LED shelf and canopy fixtures that incorporate a CRI of 93 and a R9 of 90. Officials say these higher levels of color enhancement and color temperature, combined with an application specific fixture design, really bring out the natural colors of fresh meat, deli and seafood in a service department.