Concept visual: Wild Bite Club.
A new Product Finder feature will let shoppers trigger the correct electronic shelf label from the Morrisons app. The small flash turns a price display into a navigation interface—and changes what a supermarket shelf can do.
The useful object is a light no larger than a price tag. A shopper searches for tahini, capers or a particular jar of curry paste in the Morrisons app, walks to the aisle the phone suggests, and then asks the shelf itself for help. One electronic label blinks. The final few feet of a supermarket search are no longer solved by scanning dozens of near-identical packs.
Morrisons is developing that feature for its Product Finder, with more than 200 stores expected to receive it by the end of November before a wider rollout next year. The British grocer calls the idea “Shop to Light,” borrowing the logic from Walmart in the United States. It sounds like a minor convenience. In practice, it turns the price ticket into a customer interface.
The label stopped being paper
The change begins with infrastructure that was installed for a different job. In October 2025, Morrisons announced that it would replace paper shelf tickets across all 497 supermarkets with about 10.8 million electronic shelf labels supplied by VusionGroup. The immediate case was operational: prices and promotions could be updated centrally, offers could appear at the shelf edge quickly, and employees would spend less time printing and replacing paper.
Electronic labels are small connected screens, usually based on low-power electronic paper. Their strategic value is not the screen alone but the network behind it. A product, its current price and its physical shelf position can be linked to a store system. Vusion describes the label as a connected endpoint capable of receiving changes from a central platform. Once that endpoint also includes a light, it can send a physical signal back into the aisle.
That is the product autopsy here: a device purchased to display prices is gaining a second life as a locator. The hardware already sits beside every stock-keeping unit. The store already knows which product is attached to which label. Morrisons only needs to connect a shopper’s search to the correct endpoint and let it flash.
A flash closes the last metre
Digital store maps solve only part of the finding problem. An aisle number can take a shopper to breakfast foods, but not necessarily to the one gluten-free cereal buried between family packs. Categories are rearranged, packaging changes, and a single bay can contain dozens of similar objects. The costly part of the search is often not crossing the store. It is the slow visual comparison at the shelf.
Morrisons’ proposed flow is unusually concrete. Product Finder directs the shopper to the right aisle. When the shopper reaches the correct area, a button in the app triggers the relevant shelf-edge label to blink. Grocery Gazette reports that the Product Finder, introduced with Google’s Gemini technology, was handling more than 50,000 searches a day at peak periods. The new light function does not need to persuade shoppers to begin a new behaviour; it is being attached to an existing search habit.
This is the important distinction between a map and a signal. A map asks the customer to translate information into a physical search. A blinking label performs the final identification. In interface terms, the supermarket is borrowing a familiar digital pattern—the highlighted search result—and rendering it in the real world.
The shelf serves two shoppers
The same mechanism can serve people who are not browsing at all. Grocery employees and delivery pickers work from lists, moving through the store under time pressure. A light at the correct shelf position can shorten the repeated hunt for a specific pack size or flavour. Reports about Morrisons’ earlier electronic-label programme already described replenishment and order-packing as use cases; Walmart has likewise used shelf-label lights to help workers locate products.
That creates a useful economic stack. The label can support price accuracy, promotion changes, replenishment, online-order picking and now customer navigation. Each additional use makes the installation easier to justify without adding another screen or kiosk to the store. The shelf edge becomes shared infrastructure for both sides of retail: the shopper trying to find one object and the operator trying to move thousands.
There is also a subtle shift in who receives service. Supermarkets have traditionally reserved precise location tools for staff devices. Bringing the same pinpointing function into the consumer app makes the physical store more self-explanatory. It may be especially valuable for unfamiliar stores, infrequently purchased ingredients and large ranges where brand recognition is weak.
The price-tag suspicion
Electronic labels arrive with baggage. Because they can update remotely, shoppers often read them as preparation for airline-style surge pricing. That concern has followed rollouts in Britain and the United States, even when retailers say the objective is accuracy and labour savings. The possibility of fast price changes is technically real; evidence that Morrisons’ blinking-label feature is a surge-pricing system is not.
The navigation function could actually make the labels feel less threatening by giving customers an obvious benefit. A device that only saves labour is easy to interpret as something done to the shopper. A device that helps locate a missing jar is something the shopper can actively use. But the trust question does not disappear. Retailers will need to explain how prices are governed, how often they change and why the screen is flashing. A label that gains agency also gains the burden of clarity.
There are practical limits too. Product Finder depends on a phone, an app and an accurate digital map of each store. Not every customer wants to shop through an account-linked interface. A blinking light must be visible without becoming visual noise, and the product still has to be in stock where the system says it is. Navigation technology cannot compensate for an empty shelf.
From finding products to finding a route
Observed now: Morrisons has a live consumer app, is rolling out electronic shelf labels, and has announced the connection between Product Finder and a blinking shelf light. The stated deployment is more than 200 stores by the end of November, followed by the wider estate next year.
Emerging signal: the electronic shelf label is moving beyond price display. Morrisons is one of several retailers treating it as a controllable point in the store: an object that can identify a product, support operational tasks and communicate at the moment a person needs help.
Possible next step: once product searches can activate individual labels, a shopping list could become a physical route. A store might sequence items efficiently, signal substitutions when a shelf is empty, or make hard-to-find dietary and allergen information easier to locate. Those uses are WBC interpretation, not features Morrisons has announced.
The commercial opportunity is not simply faster shopping. It is the conversion of static shelf real estate into addressable media and service infrastructure. That also creates risk: the more functions move into the retailer’s app, the more the physical store may favour logged-in customers over those who prefer to shop anonymously. Useful navigation and promotional manipulation can share the same wire.
The shelf edge becomes the store
Morrisons’ blinking label matters because it solves a small irritation with almost no new object. The light is already attached to the place where the answer lives. That makes it more credible than another supermarket robot, screen or smart trolley: it disappears when it is not needed.
The best retail technology often looks underwhelming in isolation. A tiny green pulse cannot transform grocery economics. But it reveals a larger change in store design. The shelf edge is becoming the last physical pixel of the supermarket’s software—capable of changing, guiding and responding. If the rollout works, the most intelligent object in the aisle may not be the trolley or the phone. It may be the price tag.