Supermarket shelves scan shopper body types and deliver messages encouraging impulse buys

Guess it was inevitable — snack food giant Mondelez International has announced plans to install shelves in its stores that will scan the body type and bone structure of its customers for the purpose of delivering targeted messages that encourage impulse purchases. 

The shelves will use Microsoft’s Kinect controller to scan customer facial features, which will tell it some basic information, including age, sex, bone structure, etc. 

Pictures of the individual’s face won’t be stored in a database, but aggregated demographic data from the thousands of transactions these stores generate will be saved so that as time passes, the snack recommendations being made to the various group “types” will become more and more accurate.

Critics of the Mondelez system fear that the bombardment of messages will not only annoy shoppers, but also lead to the impulse purchases of unhealthy snacks. Not that this is a problem for Mondelez — the company's roster includes popular names like Chips Ahoy, Oreo, Toblerone, and Trident. But for those who don’t pay much attention to what’s going in their cart while they’re shopping, the technology could introduce a rather unhealthy diet change, unbeknownst to the shoppers themselves.

Mondelez will debut the technology in 2015.

Story via: psfk.com