Last month, I visited a beverage company, and we talked about how, as the weather gets hotter, beverage companies are busily placing refrigerators and cold-air cabinets at terminals and supermarkets. The business director, however, smiled wryly and said they were going to slow down their current refrigerator placement progress.

We were quite surprised, as summer is approaching. In summer, the main battlefield for beverages shifts from terminal store shelves to refrigerators, where thousands of SKUs compete for limited space. By convention, free placement of refrigerators at terminals is a major task for beverage manufacturers before May Day each year.

The business director explained that evaluating placement locations, selecting models, placing them correctly, tracking assets continuously, and maintaining equipment already constitute a huge workload—but that's just the beginning of the game.

Most importantly, placed refrigerators must avoid being treated as "public resources" by competitors. Therefore, they must ensure the purity of the refrigerators, constantly monitor their fullness, and maintain key indicators like shelf space. This requires sales representatives to follow standard operating procedures, conduct line checks, and capture images, while backend auditors review the field-collected data to ensure strict execution of front-line standards.

Easier said than done. With about a thousand sales reps nationwide, each rep must, during inspections, follow procedures to count competitor SKUs, own SKUs, display facings, display layers, and capture images of successful refrigerator displays.

The problem is that data collection relies on manual entry, making data authenticity hard to guarantee. To ensure strict compliance with refrigerator display standards, backend auditors must review each piece of data one by one, which is another huge labor cost.

In previous years, they invested heavily in May to seize competitor refrigerators, only to find that competitors' units were well-maintained while their own were poorly maintained due to personnel efficiency and labor costs. Combined with this year's pandemic, they decided to suspend refrigerator display investments altogether.

In fact, this company's problem is common to all beverage companies, showing that inefficient refrigerator display checks severely hinder the healthy development of the beverage industry's business expansion.

So how do well-performing companies manage their refrigerators? Several well-known beverage companies served by Field 365 took the lead in adopting artificial intelligence, using image recognition to automatically detect whether refrigerator displays meet requirements, counting purity, own SKUs, competitor SKUs, refrigerator layers, available display facings, display width, empty spaces or foreign objects, and automatically calculating fullness and facing share.

Sales reps only need to take a few photos, and within seconds, image capture, display standard comparison, result output, and effect evaluation are completed, revolutionizing "inefficient display checks." Reps no longer need to manually fill in data, nor do auditors need to review photos one by one.

However, this places new demands on AI image recognition: it must not only "recognize accurately" but also "understand the business."

Once refrigerators are placed, many assessment items are set for front-line reps, so accurate recognition is crucial; otherwise, unfair assessments could increase management difficulty rather than reduce it.

Accurate recognition means not only correctly identifying refrigerator types (single-door, double-door, freezer), own/competitor SKUs, empty spaces, empty space widths, and refrigerator layers, but also handling recognition interference. For example, if a refrigerator is placed next to shelves, and the captured image includes shelf products, the AI should automatically filter out shelf products and only recognize items inside the refrigerator.

If the refrigerator door reflects light, causing misjudgment, can it accurately filter out the reflective parts of the door? It must also solve practical scenarios, such as for larger refrigerators, supporting multiple shots of different sections and automatically stitching them into a complete image.

Accurate recognition is just the entry requirement; the AI must also understand the industry, knowing what needs to be managed in beverage refrigerator displays and what business departments need to see (e.g., automatically analyzing and outputting results like own-product purity, own-product share in refrigerator, and fullness).

Field 365, deeply rooted in the FMCG industry, provides recognition algorithms that better understand refrigerator displays. If you want to learn more about beverage industry refrigerator management, feel free to scan the QR code to register and communicate~

Own-product purity = own facings / (own facings + competitor facings + unrecognized facings); Own-product share in refrigerator = own facings / (own facings + competitor facings + unrecognized facings + empty spaces); Refrigerator fullness = (own facings + competitor facings + unrecognized facings) / (own facings + competitor facings + unrecognized facings + empty spaces);

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Tips will be paid 400-2000 yuan once adopted.