Foodstuffs, New Zealand’s largest grocery distributor and owner of New World, PAK’nSAVE and Four Square, is known for customer-centric innovation. To further improve the shopping experience, New World developed the Zoom Trolley – an app-enabled smart trolley that lets customers scan items, track spending, and check out without unloading their cart.
The challenge:
To successfully launch such a disruptive concept, Foodstuffs needed to ensure Zoom Trolley delivered both a frictionless customer experience and measurable operational benefits.
Our approach:
Our experience and design arm Purple Shirt led three rounds of user experience research with staff and customers, combining interviews, in-store testing, and surveys. Each round delivered actionable insights to refine the Zoom Trolley’s interface, ergonomics, privacy, and operational fit. This iterative process shaped a phased customer journey, from app registration through to checkout, and validated improvements along the way.
The results:
- Customers valued the speed, control, and empowerment of the Zoom Trolley experience.
- Operational teams gained clarity on usability issues and process integration.
- Foodstuffs executives endorsed a wider rollout, supported by a clear UX model and a prioritised improvement roadmap.
- The project achieved both customer validation and business readiness for pilot deployment.
“I have been impressed by the depth of experience Purple Shirt have shown throughout this engagement providing significantly more value than customer survey capability. Their skill is in identifying points of friction through observation, even where the customer could not articulate it and we might have missed it. I have valued Steve’s counsel on how to develop a truly customer driven product and will not hesitate to engage Purple Shirt in the future.”
Ashley Colyer
Solutions Delivery Manager
