A few months ago, the night crew at a ShopRite store run by Village Supermarket spent around four hours a week up ladders, checking the cases stacked above the shelves for stock the store’s system said was there. In Top Stock’s first month in that store, our cameras found $24,000 of inventory nobody could see. The crew now spends about an hour a week on those audits, and has 10 hours back for other work.
That store is a good picture of what we’ve been building this year, and it’s a big part of why we’re proud to share that Focal has won Emerging Retail Technology Innovation of the Year at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards.
A category for technology that’s already working
RTIH introduced this category in 2026 to recognize emerging technology that has moved beyond the proof-of-concept stage and is scaling and delivering results for retailers and their customers. That framing matters to us. Shelf cameras are still new to a lot of stores, and the question we hear from retailers is whether the results hold up once you go past a pilot.
The judges this year included retail leaders from Walmart, Amazon, JD Sports Fashion, Holland & Barrett, CVS Health, East of England Co-op and others. Being chosen by people who run stores every day means a great deal to the team.
We were also a finalist in two other categories: Technology Vendor of the Year (UK) and Best Data Analytics Driven Retail Initiative. Congratulations to everyone shortlisted alongside us.
From spotting gaps to getting them filled
Our cameras have always photographed every shelf, every hour. In 2026, we pointed that same view at the stock above the shelf and, in trials, the back room. An empty shelf often has the product it needs sitting a few feet away. Once the system can see that stock, it can turn a gap into a task someone can finish, schedule it for the right time of day, and check the shelf an hour later to confirm the job is done. Across our customers, the cameras have now confirmed more than 23 million gaps filled.
At Morrisons, which runs Focal across almost 500 supermarkets, the time it takes to spot an empty shelf has dropped from as long as a day to around 30 minutes. On-shelf availability is up 2–4%, and the business is saving more than £10 million a year in labor.
Bob Belsky, Senior VP of Village Supermarkets, ShopRite, put it this way: “Finding $24,000 in unaccounted inventory in the first month wasn’t what we expected, but it told us immediately that this was a problem worth solving. The labor savings on top of that made it an easy decision to keep going.”
What’s next
This award comes in a strong year for the team, following In-Store Technology of the Year at the Retail Systems Awards in June and a place on RTIH’s Hot 100 list. Village is extending Top Stock to additional stores.
Thank you to RTIH, to the judges, and to the retailers who let us test, learn and build alongside their store teams.
Want to see how Focal works in your stores? Get in touch.
