Product Swap Prevention Overview

Prevent Product Swaps of Weight-Based Foods at Self-Checkouts

Digimarc enables trust—and protects profitability—at grocery self-checkouts

According to the National Retail Federation, retail shrink exceeded $112 billion in 2024. For grocery retailers, a surprising amount of shrink comes from the sale of weight-based hot and cold foods like hot wings. At self-checkout kiosks, it’s easy for customers to swap a lower-cost product code rather than weigh the item and pay the correct, higher amount.

Solution Overview

Unlike costly computer vision solutions that only detect fraud, Digimarc prevents fraud at the point of sale. Our solution enables you to print hundreds of invisible digital identifiers, called digital watermarks, across the entire surface of food containers—without altering the artwork or visible design. Think of them as hidden, data-carrying barcodes that scanners reliably detect, every time. So, when a customer with a weight-based item tries to product-swap, the scanner will reliably detect the container’s watermarks, identify the item, override any incorrect entry, and charge the right amount—no human interaction needed. And because our watermarks integrate seamlessly with weightbased and other variable product codes, they trigger code overrides only when necessary.

Key Benefits

Adding digital watermarks to your containers won’t disrupt your current container printing process or compromise brand aesthetics. But they will help you:

• Protect your margins
• Reduce shrink by over 40%
• Improve pricing accuracy for a fair, frictionless customer experience
• Minimize awkward customer interactions for employees

How Digimarc’s Product Swap Prevention solution works

Automatically detect and correct pricing when an entered product look-up (PLU) code doesn’t match the digital watermark’s product data.