Virtual grocery store will offer insight into shopping behaviour

A virtual grocery store at the University of Guelph will be used to provide insight into the shopping decisions and behaviours of consumers.

Located on the third floor of the campus's Macdonald Stewart Building, the U of G Food Innovation Research Lab looks more like a grocery store than a laboratory, with products of all kinds lining shelves, a dairy cooler in the rear and even a check out.

People will be brought in to "shop" in the room while wearing special eye glasses containing a camera that will track what they look at, when they look at it and how long they look at it for.

That data will all me recorded and analyzed in an adjoining lab.

"This really is exciting. Nothing else in the world is like this, this combination of facilities," said the U of G professor Mike von Massow, the driving force behind the project, at it's official opening on Wednesday.

"We have a unique combination, multi-component hybrid lab facility."

Von Massow said the food retail lab is unique, bigger, better connected and with better technology than anything else in the world.

"This will allow us to fundamentally understand how people make decisions in grocery stores," he said.

"How are people making choices and can we affect choices? Are there things we can do to encourage people to make good choices?"

The lab is a joint project between the Ontario Agriculture College and the U of G's business school.

The research lab has been created in partnership with the Longos grocery store chain.

Von Massow said that understanding consumer behaviour is an essential part of being known as Canada's food university.

"We can do all we want at the production side, but unless we can convince people to buy that, it makes no difference at all," von Massow said.

The same project will also be used to study menu reading behaviour in P.J.'s teaching restaurant located on the ground floor of the same building.

"That line between food service and retail is blurring," von Massow said. "This provides us an opportunity to understand what those dynamics are."

What people look at first on the shelf, what they look at on labels first and for how long, if font and size of print affects shopping behaviour, different kinds of packaging and if having certain products beside one another on the shelf encourage engagement are just a some of the things that will be studied.

"I'm delighted for this phenomenal investment which is going to be transformative," said Malcolm Campbell, the U of G's vice-president (research). "In that food innovation space, the timing couldn't be better."