Foodstuffs North Island is beginning to trial facial recognition in select stores as part of its commitment to keep teams and customers safe by keeping previous offenders out.
Foodstuffs North Island (FSNI) – the 100 percent NZ-owned co-operative of more than 300 grocers across the North Island – has started trialling the use of facial recognition (FR) as part of its ongoing fight against retail crime.
The trial is in up to 25 North Island stores and is intended to run for up to six months. The technologies' ability to help better identify repeat offenders and reduce harmful behaviour in stores will help Foodstuffs North Island determine if the co-op adopts FR more widely.
"Everyone has the right to a safe working environment and a safe place to buy groceries," said Foodstuffs North Island Chief Executive Chris Quin.
"This trial of FR in our stores is part of our commitment to keeping our teams and customers safe."
He continued that retail crime was a growing problem, here and overseas.
"Our North Island stores recorded 4,719 incidents in the October-December quarter of 2023 alone."
This is 34 percent more than the 3,510 recorded in the previous quarter.
"Shockingly, one of our security team was stabbed recently, and our people are being punched, kicked, bitten and spat at. We're seeing over 14 serious incidents a week, including an average of two assaults."
Chris Quin, Foodstuffs North Island Chief Executive
"All too often, it's the same people coming back to our stores despite having already been trespassed, committing more crime, and often putting our team members and customers at risk of abuse and violence."
Quin said that Foodstuffs had a moral and legal duty to make stores as safe as possible for its teams and customers, and facial recognition has the potential to help by identifying repeat offenders when they try to come back into stores.
All images in the FR system will be instantly deleted unless a person has committed a crime, has been aggressive, violent or threatening towards our team members or customers, or has actively assisted in such harmful behaviour. This is a high threshold that Foodstuffs is committed to.
"The trial is necessary because we hope to establish if FR will help keep our people and customers safe without compromising their privacy. When preparing the trial, Foodstuffs has thoroughly ensured it respects its customers' privacy, including having a specialist and independent organisation design and review the trial, which will also evaluate the results.
"We've also engaged with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner to ensure they're well briefed and aware of how the trial will work."
FR works by matching, in real-time, the faces of people who enter a store against that store's record of offenders and accomplices.
The FR system analyses facial features and converts them into an alphanumeric computer code. Both the images and the code will be securely stored.
The stores taking part in the trial will be a combination of PAK'nSAVE and New World supermarkets in cities and towns around the North Island. Each store will have clear signage at the entrance. When someone enters the store, their image will be taken by the FR system and instantly compared against the store's record of previous offenders and accomplices. Only images of offenders and accomplices actively assisting in offending will be retained.
The FR system must detect a 90 percent facial match. If a store's FR system matches the face of a person entering the store with that of someone in the store's record of offenders and accomplices within the FR system, two specially trained team members must agree it's a match before the information is acted on. Team members have also been trained to approach the best people verified as repeat offenders.
Foodstuffs North Island's General Counsel, Julian Benefield, said planning for the trial over the past 15 months has included the appointment of an independent third-party organisation to design and oversee the trial and a pre-trial consultation with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.
"We've been cautious about ensuring this trial gets the balance right between providing a safe environment for our people and customers and respecting everyone's privacy," said Benefield.
The FR systems will be subject to strict access controls, with only authorised and specially trained store team members, who are required to keep information confidential, having access.
"Retail crime is our biggest safety risk, and we must do all we can to mitigate that risk. Each store has robust data protection safeguards in place. Images not matching the store's previous offenders' and accomplices' records will be instantly deleted. Only images of previous offenders and their accomplices will be kept in the store's FR system for longer - offenders for up to two years and their accomplices for three months."
Customer caught stealing wielding a knife
No information stored in the FR system will be shared between stores, and no information from the FR systems will be shared with third parties unless this is required by law or to run and evaluate the trial.
"No images of minors under the age of 18, or vulnerable people, will be enrolled into a store's record of offenders and accomplices within the FR system."
"All these parameters have been put in place to assure our customers that our FR trial is solely about retail safety and security and learning if FR can help us better identify repeat offenders, so if they return, we can safely and quickly remove them, making the store safer for our teams and customers."
Benefield said the trial's success in achieving that goal will help determine whether FR is used more by the cooperative on an ongoing basis.
"Our trial will include a control group of at least 25 stores that have no FR system that we use as a baseline, so we can determine whether the use of FR is effective at helping us identify repeat offenders and their accomplices and lowering the rate of retail crime and the risk to people's safety."
