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The back of store – the place where trucks and pallets of goods from all corners really turn into CPG. Almost like they are finally being born into the world all bright and beautiful and ready for purchase. But the circle of life dictates that there is another part of the journey. Yep, brace yourself. We’re talking End of Life.
It’s not fun to think about, especially for retailers. But it’s inevitable. Products get returned and are cheerfully accepted back from your loyal and valued customers – half a jug of laundry detergent that caused irritation. Errant fork placement when unloading a pallet – 14 bottles of supplements compromised. Someone changes their oil in the parking lot – a gallon of used oil and a filter in an old cooler.
This is where the back of store becomes particularly important. Retailers must handle, store and dispose of waste generated on their site (even by their customers) safely and compliantly.
Ok, great. That sounds right.
But each back of store sits, well, in a different store.
Yeah, obviously.
Each store is in a different place.
Are you getting to something, Captain Obvious?
Different places can have vastly different rules about how particular products need to be handled. A store in CA has to treat supplements one way, while a location in MT has different rules. There can be hundreds, even thousands, of employees that now need to interpret local, regional, and national rules and regulations about tens of thousands of products a retailer sells to get them out of the back of the store.
Sounds complicated.
And to know which regulations even apply, you must know things about the products, like chemistry and battery details, just to name a couple.
Sounds really complicated.
It is. Retailers spend tons of time, money, and effort trying to make sure each and every product they must dispose gets to the right place. That means gathering and curating the best data about products, interpreting the data AND the rules (regulations) and THEN distilling that information into a simple, effective way to make the right choice in the back of store.
We thought it could be smarter. So we made smarter-1. And this is how you can use it to power back of store decisioning. Retailers have a waste accumulation area – It’s in the back of store or adjacent as one would expect. The area has different containers to store different types of waste – Common types are Flammables, Toxics, Aerosols, etc. Every product that must be disposed must be sorted and stored correctly according to its characteristics AND the law (wherever that back of store may be in the country).
If it’s not right, it can cost millions.
smarter-1 takes basic information about products that is already available – the product is listed somewhere online right? – and in a matter of seconds, returns actionable classifications that can be used to power back of store decisions.
We start with just UPC and product name (and not a very descriptive one) – what a retailer has available already.
WE enrich the product data from the best sources. For example, we got the Safety Data Sheet and ingredients.
We’ve already saved you time and money, but now we do even more. We USE the data we gathered and the data from the SDS to start classifying.
You can see that we determined the NFPA diamond. Awesome to know for storage. You can also see that we classified this product as Hazard Class 3. That’s Flammable Liquids.
Now if we know a product is a flammable liquid, we can map that to the appropriate waste container in the back of store. Probably the Flammables one, right?
This example is a bit simplistic, but smarter-1 works in the same way for every federal and state regulation. So no matter where your back of stores are, you know how each product should be treated at its EOL. It’s fast, accurate, and it helps your team do more with less.
Contact us today to take control of your product decisions at scale for a fraction of the traditional cost.