Why fresh categories break traditional POS
Bakery, produce, deli and hot food are sold without barcodes. On a traditional register the cashier memorises a price-lookup code — hundreds of them, per store, per season.
The three failure modes
- Wrong PLU — a cheap item rung up as an expensive one, or the reverse
- Slow lookup — the cashier hunts through a menu while the queue grows
- New items — a new product has no code until someone creates one
What on-device recognition changes
The camera proposes the item; the cashier confirms or corrects. The confirmation step is not a weakness — it is what makes the workflow acceptable to cashiers and auditable for loss prevention.
Design rules
- Never remove the manual override. Recognition must be a proposal, not a decision.
- Show confidence, not just a label. Cashiers learn which proposals to double-check.
- Handle the scale. For weighed goods, recognition and the scale reading must be merged in one transaction, not two.
- Log a thumbnail per transaction. Without it you cannot explain a wrong charge after the fact.
Measuring success
Track item handling time and correction rate separately. A rising correction rate means the catalogue or the lighting changed — not necessarily that the model got worse.