Digital price tags save energy and costs

Altierre leads the way in digital, price-tagging technology

Altierre Digital Retail is out to change the infrastructure of every supermarket. 

Our local supermarkets are littered with price tags - little pieces of paper, which indicate what’s on sale, or, admittedly, what the price of my dinner is going to be for the night. 

Actually, I’ve never thought about all the energy and effort that goes into putting up those enticing "On Sale” price tags.

Apparently, it’s a big waste of paper and money.  “There are over 90 million sheets of paper that one national chain alone wasted on paper price tags,” says Sunit Saxena, CEO of Altierre Digital Retail.  

Altierre Digital Retail has the solution: wireless, dynamic, electronic price tags for large retail chains.  These are small, energy-efficient, all-in-one LED screens that can display anything from the price of a gallon of milk to the dietary information about the next bag of chips you’re going to purchase.   

There are “10,000 price changes a week with tags," Saxena explained. 

With Altierre’s electronic price tags, price changes could be made instantly from grocery store headquarters.  These price changes would also instantly sync up with front registers eliminating the possibility of overpricing.  The store would then be automated, reducing the labor costs of workers having to cut out tags and place them throughout the store overnight.  “With our system you put 40,000 tags, and the store is automated," said Saxena.

Altierre manufactures the entire package, including the wireless technology to control 40,000 price tags, something that standard WiFi wouldn’t be able to handle.  To top it off, the batteries in the digital price tags which process information, communicate, and display prices last not for hours, but years.

With funding from plenty of investors including Galleon Group, ATA Ventures, D. E. Shaw group, DuPont Capital Management, Labrador Ventures, and Kinetic Ventures, Altierre has raised a total of $60 million since its establishment in 2003.

Check out a short interview with Sunit Saxena I shot at the AlwaysOn Venture Summit in Half Moon Bay last week.