Niemann Foods Stocking Stores With iBeacons

Beacons, it turns out, aren’t just for the big kids. The Niemann Foods supermarket chain is putting iBeacons in all 45 of its County Market stores across Illinois, Iowa and Missouri, according to Mobile Commerce Daily.

That makes Niemann one of the first independent grocery chains to roll out iBeacons, along with the mobile apps and analytics to serve up in-store services and personalized offers. The chain already has the beacons operating in eight stores, and plans to have the rest live with the system by the end of June.

But even with only a handful of stores outfitted, Niemann has already seen several thousand more downloads of both iOS and Android versions of its My County Market app, which now includes customized offers, aisle-location options, and the ability to create shopping lists.

Recent data from Niemann users shows higher-than-industry-average mobile app retention rates and in-store shopper engagement, according to Birdzi, the analytics vendor whose Shopper Engagement platform is on the back end of the system.

“Our experience is shoppers will readily adopt new technologies and new ways of doing things if the value proposition is right, as long as there are savings and other benefits relevant to the shopper,” Birdzi Executive Director Gary Hawkins told Mobile Commerce Daily.

Supermarkets are also one of the most obvious store types for beacon use, according to Hawkins. “The typical supermarket has 40,000 SKUs and often has thousands of products on sale at a given time,” he said. “The ability of a retailer or brand to leverage Birdzi’s platform and sophisticated targeting helps provide the right offer to the right shopper at the right time and in the right place.”

Like other major retailers, large grocery chains have been testing beacons for the past year — for example, Safeway and Giant Eagle had iBeacons in dozens of stores in San Francisco, Cleveland and Seattle in early 2014. But many of the biggest still haven’t made the jump, so a full-on commitment by a small chain like Niemann is notable.

There’s another reason Niemann is unusual in the move toward beacons. While other independent chains rolling out beacons, such as the 15-store New Seasons Market stores in Portland, Oregon, tend to be clustered in urban areas, Niemann’s County Market stores are scattered across a wide swath of the midwest, many in small towns with populations between 10,000 and 25,000 — and they’re not suburbs. That’s a strong sign beacons are not just for big-city kids, either.