TLDR: Unilever, a global ice cream giant, is revolutionizing its operations by integrating AI and image capture technology into its freezer cabinets. This innovation allows for real-time stock monitoring, optimized inventory management, and improved sales strategies, leading to significant increases in retail orders and sales, with some regions seeing growth of up to 30%. The initiative aims to equip 350,000 freezers with AI by the end of 2025.
Unilever, a leading global consumer goods company, is at the forefront of leveraging artificial intelligence to transform its vast ice cream business. The company has embarked on an ambitious initiative to integrate AI and image capture technology into its extensive network of freezer cabinets worldwide, aiming to revolutionize stock management, optimize supply chains, and significantly boost sales.
As of August 2024, 100,000 of Unilever’s ice cream freezer cabinets globally are equipped with AI capabilities, with a strategic goal to expand this to 350,000 by the end of 2025. This technological advancement is designed to address the critical challenge of ensuring product availability at the point of sale, especially for impulse purchases like ice cream. Sarosh Hussain, Ice Cream’s Head of Digital Selling Systems, emphasizes the importance of this, stating, “To win those impulse sales, our brands need to be available at the right place and the right time. For example, if a customer breaks their journey at a petrol station to buy a Magnum and the freezer is out of stock, there’s no second chance, the sale’s lost.”
The AI-enabled freezers utilize image capture software, carefully positioned to photograph only the stock inside the cabinet. These images are periodically and automatically transmitted to the cloud, where AI algorithms analyze them to identify Unilever’s ice cream brands, assess stock depth, and generate precise order recommendations for distributors. Hussain likens this continuous monitoring to having “two eyes looking at our stock every day,” ensuring distributors have real-time data on what each retail outlet needs.
This innovative approach has yielded tangible results in retail orders and sales. While the growth varies by country, Unilever has reported incremental sales increases ranging from 8% in Turkey to 12% in the US, and a remarkable up to 30% in Denmark. In Hungary, where nearly 10% of the freezer fleet was AI-enabled in the summer of 2024, the integration of the freezer system with distributor systems has led to close to 5% of orders being generated directly from the AI system’s recommendations during the ice cream season.
Beyond direct sales uplift, the data insights from these AI-enabled freezers are also instrumental in upskilling sales teams. By providing them with real-time information on stock levels and sales patterns, sales representatives can engage in more productive and proactive calls, focusing on new business development and merchandising rather than just order processing. This also allows for more efficient and cost-effective planning of delivery routes for refrigerated vans, as distributors gain a more accurate understanding of customer demand.
Furthermore, the extensive data collected from the AI-enabled freezer fleet offers significant opportunities for marketing and product development. Unilever can analyze this big data to understand the correlation between above-the-line marketing campaigns and freezer sales, compare performance across seasons, and gain insights to reassess promotion planning and reforecast product demand. This capability helps determine if new products are genuinely adding value or cannibalizing existing core brands.
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Looking ahead, Unilever anticipates that a fully AI-enabled fleet of 350,000 freezers will provide a massive dataset for advanced analytics on product visibility and supply chain strategy, ultimately enabling the company to serve shoppers better and drive further growth in ice cream sales. This initiative underscores Unilever’s commitment to leveraging cutting-edge technology to maintain its competitive edge and optimize its global operations.
