Digital Front Door
The Digital Front Door explores how technology is reshaping the retail industry and redefining the in-store customer experience. Each episode features conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and solution providers who are driving change at the intersection of digital tools and brick-and-mortar retail. From AI-powered shopping carts to retail media, personalization, and operational efficiency, the show dives into the strategies and solutions that help retailers improve shopper engagement, increase loyalty, and grow revenue. Listeners can expect practical insights, forward-looking ideas, and real-world examples of how the “digital front door” is opening new opportunities in retail.
Digital Front Door
Bakery’s RFID Pivot: Faster Counts, Fresher Shelves, Less Waste
Walk past the warm glow of a grocery bakery and you’re not just smelling bread—you’re sensing the store’s promise of freshness. We dig into why that promise is so hard to keep with manual counts, perishable windows, and production guesswork that swing between empty shelves and costly waste. Then we pull the thread on a simple shift with outsized impact: swapping standard price stickers for RFID‑enabled labels to get real‑time, item‑level visibility without adding friction to the floor.
We share how handheld scans turn hours of counting into minutes, freeing associates to serve people instead of paper. With clearer data, teams align bake schedules to actual demand, reduce shrink by up to 35%, and protect margins. We also unpack the high‑stakes moment of recalls, where RFID helps pinpoint and pull only affected items up to 95% faster, avoiding blanket removals and preserving customer trust. The ROI story is compelling—often under six months—making bakery the ideal pilot before expanding into deli, meat, and produce.
Along the way, we spotlight industry momentum, including major grocers moving first in bakery to build the case for digitizing fresh. The takeaway is bigger than tech: it’s about delivering freshness, reducing waste, and earning loyalty where it matters most—at the shelf. If you’re weighing where to start with store digitization, this is the proof point you can bring to your next ops meeting. Subscribe, share with your team, and drop a review to tell us where you’d pilot RFID next.
Well, hello everyone. Welcome to Scott's Thoughts. I'm Scott Benedict. You know, when you walk into a grocery store, one of the first things that you typically notice is the bakery section. Fresh bread, pastries, cakes not only drive impulse purchases, but they also shape a shopper's perspective of freshness that extends across the whole store. But there is a challenge. Bakeries inherently are labor-intensive and dependent upon manual inventory counts, and obviously both the components and the finished goods are highly perishable. Employees can end up spending two to three hours every day counting and rotating product. And even then, those counts may only be about 55 to 65% accurate. That leads to the worst possible outcome, either empty shelves on one side or costly waste and overproduction on the other side. This is where RFID technology that I've been talking about a little bit recently really is becoming a game changer in our industry. There's a new white paper out from the team at Avery Denison that I've been reading recently that highlights the fact that the bakery department really is the sweet spot, if you will, improving the value of RFID technology in grocery. By replacing standard price labels with RFID-enabled labels, grocers can gain real-time item-level visibility without it adding uh unnecessary complexity to their workflows. And the neat thing is that the impact is just about immediate. Inventory counts that once took hours can be done in a matter of minutes, nearly a 95% reduction in the time it takes to perform that very simple uh task. That frees associates to focus on customers and customer service instead of clipboards and taking counts of their of their inventory. It also means fresher products on the shelf, better alignment between production and demand, uh, and up to 35% less food waste, which is a huge component of profitability in that area. And when recalls occur, RFID enables them to be executed up to 95% faster, targeting only those affected items and protecting both the consumer and the brand and the retailer's reputation. The payoff is quick. Most grocers see a return on investment in less than six months. And it's no surprise that Kroger, one of the largest grocers in the U.S., has partnered recently in a redemption. This was the topic of this white paper I was reading, to bring RFID into their bakeries as a first step towards digitizing all of their fresh categories. For me, bakery is a powerful reminder that transformation normally starts small, but by proving the value of high visibility, high-waste departments like bakery, grocers can build the case to expand RFID across the store, unlocking efficiency, sustainability, and perhaps most importantly, customer trust at scale. The lesson for retailers is pretty clear. RFID is no longer just about supply chain efficiency, although it is about that. It's also about delivering freshness, reducing waste, and building loyalty with customers where it matters most. The technology is here. It feels like the ROI is increasingly proven, and leaders are really moving fast in this area of the business. The only question is when will other retailers also get on board and start to use this technology for the benefit of their business and perhaps most importantly for their customers? That's what I've been thinking about. I'm Scott Benedict.