The Vision Institute and the Casino Group opened an experiment supermarket in May. The goal? Make the lives of two million visually impaired French citizens a bit easier and open a real store next year using the innovations that are presently being tested.

“Be careful, lactose! ” In the not too distant future, smartphones will enable visually impaired people to access essential information about consumer goods. This is in any case the goal of the experimental shop set up by the Casino Group for six months, in the heart of l’Institut de la Vision in Paris’ 12th arrondissement. The idea? “Have a laboratory store which develops and provides solutions that are validated and tested by the l’Institut de la Vision,” says Margot Roynette, project manager in the Department of Innovation at the Casino Group. Each new project allows us “to analyze the existing situation, make proposals and get feedback from experts at the Institute and visually impaired people to validate the work done.” Behind this admirable ambition, the group is also responding to a regulatory constraint. The “Accessibility and Mobility” law of 2005 requires that all stores be accessible to the visually impaired and disabled by 2015.

First changes aimed at packaging
The first site tested and validated by experts focused on the redesign of product packaging, which clients often lament is difficult to read and privileges secondary information at the expense of the basics. The nature of the product, the expiration date, and the quantity and weight often disappear under marketing pressures that instead focus on the supposed virtues of the product. “Today, packaging on the shelves is generally difficult to read and distinguish from one another. Differentiation and readability are a problem even though those are the essential qualities of the product. So we worked on graphics, typography, font sizes, colors.” Farewell to formats that interfere with understanding. Finally, there is a uniform hierarchy of basic information about different products. The goal is not to create a uniform packaging for all Casino brand products, but focus instead on essential goods responding to three basic criteria: recognition, visibility and tracking of key information.

Digital technologies in the bag
Casino has other ideas up its sleeve on which it intends to capitalize during the opening of this store. New features include: e-commerce, downloadable maps for easier access to shops, NFC (near field communication), less aggressive lighting, easy to read electronic tags and labels which one can zoom in on with a phone. No longer obliged to create shopping lists, a single pass of an NFC chip-quipped phone on various chip-equipped “home shopping” products will allow users to directly order staples without leaving the kitchen. “The idea is to try to accompany the customer from his or her home to the product, easily and quickly.”

Photos credits: City of Paris

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Translated by Genny Cortinovis

Related content : experimentation, NFC, Paris, trade, visually impaired