"No freezer, no sales." For beer, water drinks, dairy, fresh milk, and ice products, the freezer is the most important sales position. If you lose the freezer war, a summer failure is almost inevitable.

Especially for beverage and beer companies, the annual freezer war is a major event in summer terminal marketing. According to statistics, the number of freezers deployed in circulation and foodservice terminals has exceeded 20 million, of which more than 70% are invested by beverage, beer, dairy, and ice product companies.

Among beverages, the three giants Kangshifu, Uni-President, and Nongfu Spring, including new players like Genki Forest; among beers, the top three, Snow, Tsingtao, and Budweiser, invest tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of freezers in terminals each year.

But such a huge number of terminal freezers mainly relies on periodic visits by terminal sales teams to maintain and improve displays. As we all know, if a task relies heavily on manual management, it inevitably falls into a black box state.

Three Major Difficulties in Doing Freezer Displays Well

Freezer display is a simple but extremely boring basic task. Due to the huge number of freezers and the need for long-term continuity, keeping freezer displays in the best condition is not easy.

In reality, freezer displays of various brands often face the following difficulties:

1. Brand freezers are easily occupied by competitors or other products, and "purity" is destroyed.

Whether alcohol and beverage products are refrigerated determines their sales volume in summer. Brand salespeople with good customer relationships may occupy other brands' freezers in terminal work.

These products that occupy others' nests are not necessarily direct competitors, such as putting beverages in a beer freezer. They may not be squeezed in by other brand salespeople; sometimes store owners may also put beer in beverage freezers.

Because brand salespeople visit periodically, they cannot monitor the display status in real time. Therefore, for a long time, the "purity" of brand freezer displays has faced huge challenges.

Poor freezer "purity" is partly a management issue and partly an unavoidable scene issue, but "purity" is a key detail that has the greatest impact on brand sales.

In any case, once freezer purity is poor, it means that the brand's large investment in terminal expenses has gone down the drain.

2. Freezer restocking is not timely, losing exposure and sales opportunities.

Salespeople's store visits and restocking can only be a supplementary method for beverage and beer restocking. In most cases, it relies on terminal store staff to restock.

Terminals face so many beverage and beer brands that omissions are inevitable, making untimely freezer restocking a common phenomenon.

Brands and products with good sell-through receive more terminal attention, and display restocking is better. But for brands and products that don't sell as fast, freezer restocking is a different story.

Especially for newly launched products in the promotion period, they need a lot of exposure and freezer display. Once there are restocking problems, sell-through is affected, and terminals pay even less attention, leading new products into a vicious cycle.

Whether brand freezers can be restocked in a timely manner as required and display main products according to business requirements has always been a major problem.

3. Some freezers' abnormal states are hard to detect, causing asset losses.

Many brands provide electricity subsidies to terminals in summer, but is the freezer's power-on duration meeting requirements? Does the business know if the freezer is not working, broken, or even moved away?

Don't underestimate these issues; this is a huge hidden loss that is not easy to discover.

A brand leader told New Distribution, "We have continuously deployed hundreds of thousands of freezers over the years, and every inventory check finds many freezers missing. No one can say when they were lost or where they went."

Of course, some strong brands can charge terminal deposits to partially solve this problem, but not all brands that deploy freezers can be so strong. This leads to manufacturers collecting deposits from distributors, but distributors cannot collect deposits from terminals.

If freezers are deployed but not working properly, electricity subsidies are wasted, and sales opportunities are lost; if freezers are lost, either distributors lose assets or terminal relationships are damaged.

Xuanwu Cloud Xuantong AIoT Smart Freezer

Revolutionizing the Freezer Marketing Model

New Distribution found that major manufacturers are still deploying a huge number of freezers in the summer of 2024, but what they are deploying is no longer traditional freezers, but AI vision freezers, a smarter type of freezer.

The emergence of AI vision freezers has almost perfectly solved the above three major problems.

According to recent data, the number of AI vision freezers in terminal stores is rising sharply. In 2018, there were only 8,000 AI vision freezers; in 2021, about 100,000; in 2022, 500,000; in 2023, 900,000. In 2024, this number is expected to reach 1.6 million, close to 10% of terminal freezers.

Among many brands, Kangshifu has the largest number of AI vision freezers, accounting for 600,000 units; Genki Forest is second with 180,000 units.

Brands like Wahaha, Uni-President, Tsingtao, and Budweiser are still in the trial stage for AI vision freezers. This shows that although the number of AI vision freezers is booming, they are far from being widely adopted.

Xuanwu Cloud Xuantong is a leading service provider in the smart freezer field, and its AIoT division has provided smart freezer solutions for many well-known brands. According to Xuanwu Cloud Xuantong's forecast, more than 30% of freezers will be upgraded to smart freezers within three years. This means that the "freezer war" model for beer and beverages will fundamentally change.

Xuanwu Cloud Xuantong Smart Freezer

Increasing Summer Freezer Sales by 20%

The working principle of the Xuanwu Cloud Xuantong AIoT Smart Freezer is very simple: a smart kit + a smart system.

The smart kit uses cameras to collect video and photo data, and integrates freezer working status monitoring equipment, uploading various data to the smart system.

The smart system is equipped with AI algorithms to monitor the freezer's operation, product display, and sell-through status in real time, and alerts in real time if any abnormal situation occurs.

The emergence of the Xuanwu Cloud Xuantong Smart Freezer has revolutionarily improved the operational quality of the freezer marketing model. How smart and powerful are its functions?

1. It no longer relies on manual supervision and management. You only need to handle abnormal situations based on system alerts, maximizing the guarantee of freezer power-on duration, display quality, and restocking timeliness, while never worrying about freezers mysteriously disappearing.

2. It no longer relies entirely on salespeople to organize displays and restock during store visits. It can remind terminals to restock and organize in a friendly manner at any time according to settings.

3. If you are willing to upgrade, it can also provide voice promotion functions. When a customer opens the freezer door, it automatically broadcasts the promotional activities of a certain product at that moment.

4. The Xuanwu Cloud Xuantong smart kit can be integrated into freezers from designated freezer manufacturers according to brand needs, and can also be installed in large numbers on traditional freezers that brands have already deployed in the market, upgrading them to smart freezers.

The emergence of the Xuanwu Cloud Xuantong Smart Freezer will completely change the traditional freezer marketing and quality management model for beer and beverages.

Compared with traditional freezer management models, according to data analysis of Xuanwu Cloud Xuantong AIoT Smart Freezers in multiple categories such as fresh milk, beverages, and beer, compared with the former, a fresh milk brand's smart freezers increased unit output by more than 20%, purity by more than 17%, and a beverage brand's freezers increased revenue by 480 yuan per unit.

Whether the emergence of a technology or tool empowers business or limits business may have different views and answers from different perspectives.

If a technology and tool can both free the frontline team from tedious and boring physical labor and truly improve business quality fundamentally, then it is undoubtedly a good tool and a "good" technology. This should be the true meaning of "technology for good."

The emergence and application of smart freezers is a good tool and a "good" technology.

Scan the code to consult Xuantong consultants immediately

Get the complete Xuantong Smart Freezer solution and learn product details