GS1 Germany's investment company butterfly & elephant provides targeted support to startups that intelligently combine standards and innovation in areas such as retail. The partnership between Kassel-based shopping cart specialist Expresso and startup Cyreen marks another milestone: Cyreen's C.A.P. technology is to be integrated into Expresso's Smart Shopper platform, enabling hyper-personalized communication with shoppers in brick-and-mortar retail stores.
C.A.P. technology becomes scalable
Cyreen combines innovative retail media concepts with established standardization: Its C.A.P. technology (Connecting Ad Impressions with Purchase) uses RFID technology to record advertising contacts in real time and links them to actual purchasing decisions. RFID chips on shopping carts record which commercials customers see by enabling automatic and contactless recording of movements in the store in real time. The collected data is then linked to the purchases made, which are identified at the checkout using the GTIN (formerly EAN). This allows the actual advertising impact and conversion to be immediately tracked and evaluated.
Through its cooperation with Expresso, Cyreen has the opportunity to apply its technology in direct interaction with a smart shopping cart. The Smart Shopper not only functions as a digital shopping assistant for consumers, but also becomes an analysis and control unit for the point of sale through the integration of C.A.P. technology. The aim is to use the smart shopper to identify the products in the shopping cart in real time and then target shoppers with hyper-personalized advertising based on their purchasing interests. These could be complementary or alternative products, for example. The logic is analogous to the possibilities offered by the online world. As soon as a product is placed in the shopping cart, based on it. By knowing the purchase interests, the advertising effect can also be taken to a new level in the market.
Making retail media measurable
The integration into Expresso's Smart Shopper platform opens up further fields of application and growth opportunities for Cyreen. For brand manufacturers in the FMCG segment, this means that retail media campaigns can now be accurately evaluated based on first-party data from brick-and-mortar retail, without invasive data collection, but with high predictive power regarding advertising effectiveness. “From the outset, our technology was designed to bridge the gap between advertising contact and actual purchasing behavior in brick-and-mortar retail. The collaboration with Expresso brings us a decisive step closer to hyper-personalized customer communication in brick-and-mortar retail,” explains Ciril Hofmann, founder of Cyreen.
In addition to the integration of C.A.P. technology, retailers and customers alike benefit from Expresso's existing smart shopper solutions. With the digital shopping cart, products are scanned directly into the cart during shopping and displayed on the integrated display. This not only simplifies the payment process, as the goods no longer have to be placed on the conveyor belt at the end, but also ensures full transparency about the purchase in real time. For retailers, the Smart Shopper platform opens up additional potential, for example through digital services such as shopping aids, targeted promotions, or a direct connection to the customer account.
The partnership also underscores butterfly & elephant's strategic focus on promoting scalable technologies with clear benefits for the industry. Cyreen exemplifies how standardization, data protection, and innovative strength lead to sustainable solutions in physical retail.
butterfly & elephant – Unlocking Potential for You. butterfly & elephant is an investment company founded by GS1 Germany in 2024 that uses corporate venture capital to help startups reach their full potential by using or promoting GS1 standards, thereby accelerating their development. What makes butterfly & elephant unique is the strong GS1 community from the consumer goods industry and retail, e-commerce, and healthcare sectors—a network of over 97,000 companies in Germany and two million worldwide. We value the entrepreneurial freedom of startups to develop their products and growth strategies independently. www.butterphant.de/en
GS1 Germany: It all started with a simple beep – exactly 50 years ago! In 1974, a barcode was scanned for the first time on a pack of chewing gum in a supermarket. This marked the beginning of automated checkout – and the start of GS1's success story. The machine-readable GS1 barcode with its GTIN is now the universal standard in global trade and is scanned ten billion times a day on products. GS1 standards are the global language for efficient and secure business processes, valid across company boundaries and continents. As part of a global network, we work with our customers and partners to develop market-driven and future-oriented solutions that directly contribute to their business success. Two million companies from 25 industries worldwide now use this language to uniquely identify products, locations, and assets, to capture relevant data, and to share it with business partners in value-added networks. GS1 – The Global Language of Business. www.gs1.de
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