X5 Retail Group, a leading Russian food retailer listed on the Moscow and London stock exchanges, has acquired a dark kitchen company called Mnogo Lososya (‘A Lot of Salmon’). The group’s head Igor Shekhterman revealed the transaction earlier this week in a media interview, without providing any financial details.
“While we see great potential in this business, we didn’t have any competencies,” he told RBC, explaining X5’s motives. The group has a packaged food factory the Moscow region, but the products are sold only in traditional outlets.
Founded in 2018 by Yakov Mendeleev and Alexander Mutovin, Mnogo Lososya has developed four brands: ‘A Lot of Salmon,’ ‘Ten Perfect Pizzas,’ ‘Rolls #1’ and ‘Yaji’ (Asian cuisine). Working with food delivery services, the company owns 25 dark kitchens in Moscow and its suburban area as well as in Rostov-on-Don (southern Russia). It performs more than 60,000 orders monthly, according to company information cited by RBC.
In 2020, the company generated 176.8 million rubles in revenue ($2.75 million at the average 2019 exchange rate) with a net loss of nearly $500,000. Mnogo Lososya was backed by Russian individual investors including Vladimir Khristenko (Nanolek), Alexander Sysoev (Sysoev FM), Stepan and Pavel Dmitriev.
Facial recognition payments
In March this year, X5 Retail launched facial recognition payments at self-checkouts, in partnership with Visa and Sber. The service uses biometric identification technologies developed in-house and provided by VisionLabs, a Russian-founded startup previously backed by Sber.
The service has been made available to Sber clients at 52, then 180 Perekrestok and Pyaterochka supermarkets. According to the company, “it takes only a few seconds to pay with a glance, and the service is comparable to a regular bank card transaction in terms of speed.”
“After scanning their goods at self-checkouts, customers can select the option to Pay with a Glance, take off their mask for a second and look into the camera. Neither a bank card nor a smartphone is needed.”
X5 claims to be among Europe’s pioneers in this field. Facial payment technologies are used by some retailers in China as well as in the USA at a much smaller scale — but it is just nascent in Europe, the X5 press service told East-West Digital News.
“I’m convinced that contactless biometric payment solutions will very soon be used universally, and this payment method will become as customary as paying with a bank card or a smartphone,” Shekhterman said run a previous statement.
Smart freshness sensors
Another innovation has just been announced by the Russian retail group. Its Perekrestok supermarket chain has launched the “large-scale implementation” of a labelling system to monitor product freshness.
Under plans, “10 million labels will be placed on items from the X5 Smart Kitchen assortment of ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook foods, making it the largest rollout of this technology in Europe.”
This label, dubbed ‘Green Dot,’ contains “smart sensors that show the current temperature of each item and its compliance with storage requirements.” Thus, customers and employees will see real-time information about the freshness of a product and the actual remaining shelf life.
The Green Dot project is being implemented in partnership with the Israeli startup Evigence Sensors.
With a 13% market share, X5 Retail Group became last year the largest digital company in the Russian online food retail segment in 2020, according to Infoline data cited by the company. Its online GMV for FY 2020 totalled 21.9 billion rubles incl. VAT ($340 million), up 346% y-o-y.
This amount included 15.0 billion rubles from the online hypermarket Vprok and 6.9 billion from the express delivery activities of Pyaterochka, Perekrestok and Okolo. Some 7.9 million e-grocery orders were fulfilled via X5’s proprietary online and mobile platforms, up from 1.4 million in 2019.
