Who Controls the Inventory: Carrefour Israel’s Smart Cart Commitment and the Retail Media Structure Behind It

Smart carts have accumulated a long trail of pilots. A store here, a banner there, enough units to generate shopper reaction and retailer interest but not enough to answer the question that actually matters for anyone making a technology investment decision at scale: what does a full-chain commitment look like, and does the financial case hold when the hardware is deployed across every store and not just tested at a handful? Global Retail, the franchisee that operates Carrefour Israel’s 150-store network, announced April 6 a five-year agreement valued at approximately $50 million with A2Z Cust2Mate Solutions Corp. (NASDAQ: AZ) to deploy 4,000 smart carts across all of its stores. The media exclusivity embedded in the agreement is what makes the deal structurally distinct from prior deployments in the category.

The rollout begins in the third quarter of 2026 across six flagship locations, with full deployment to follow. The package covers hardware, charging infrastructure, software systems, implementation, training, and long-term support. A service level agreement specifying performance indicators will be finalized by May 30, 2026, according to the companies’ joint press release. Carrefour Israel projects approximately $35 million in profits tied to the deal, attributing the expected gains to better same-store sales from personalized promotions, faster checkout, and operational efficiencies. Both companies described the rollout as positioning Carrefour Israel as one of the first retailers in the world to implement smart cart technology at this chain-level scale, and framed it as a reference deployment intended to establish a model for future international markets.

The Revenue Structure Behind the Hardware

Under the disclosed terms, Carrefour Israel grants A2Z Cust2Mate exclusive retail media and data monetization capabilities across the entire deployed smart cart platform for the duration of the agreement. The technology partner, not the retailer’s own media organization, controls the in-cart advertising inventory and the data monetization layer.

A2Z Cust2Mate’s business model converts the hardware deployment into a recurring revenue stream by selling advertising access to brands that want to reach shoppers during their trips. The arrangement removes capital and operational burden from the retailer; the implication for media economics is that the upside from in-cart advertising accrues primarily outside the retailer’s own P&L. For Carrefour Israel, the $35 million profit projection is a company-stated forward estimate attached to a deployment that has not yet begun, and the performance thresholds governing the relationship will not be set until the service level agreement is finalized in May.

In-store media access at Carrefour Israel’s smart cart platform will flow through A2Z Cust2Mate’s commercial arrangements, not through Carrefour Israel’s own trade or media team. Carrefour’s group-level Carrefour Links platform sits on a data lake of 8 billion transactions across 80 million customers, according to Carrefour’s own strategic communications, giving large CPG partners an existing relationship with the broader Carrefour media infrastructure. Whether that relationship extends to the cart-level inventory at Carrefour Israel, or whether the A2Z Cust2Mate exclusivity creates a separate procurement path entirely, is a question the May service level agreement will need to address. The current disclosures do not answer it.

The exclusivity runs five years. CPG brands and retail media planners building in-store strategies across multiple retailers need to account for the fact that accessing Carrefour Israel’s smart cart surface means negotiating through the technology partner, with potentially different timelines, minimum commitments, and reporting structures than working through a retailer’s own network.

How In-Cart Advertising Has Developed Elsewhere

Instacart, which acquired smart cart maker Caper AI for $350 million in 2021, has been the most extensively documented case in independent reporting. By the end of 2025, Instacart had tripled its Caper Cart store count compared to the prior year, reaching nearly 100 cities across 15 U.S. states and more than a dozen retail banners, according to Modern Retail’s November 2025 reporting. Expansion during 2025 included international deployments at Coles Supermarkets in Australia and at a Morrisons location in the United Kingdom. In each case, Instacart’s approach has been to pilot at one or two locations within a banner and build from demonstrated performance. Based on the disclosed terms, the Carrefour Israel agreement is structured differently: the six-store pilot is contracted into a predetermined chainwide commitment, suggesting the full-scale financial case is being made before operational proof exists at this specific retailer.

On the advertising side, Instacart opened Caper Cart inventory to all of its brand partners in early 2025, following a pilot with more than 50 CPG partners, according to Path to Purchase Institute reporting in March 2025. Mindy Shaltry, senior director of omnichannel marketing and activation at Mondelez International, described the format in that reporting as enabling the company to connect with shoppers during seasonal moments tied to specific product occasions. Grocery Dive’s August 2025 reporting quoted Instacart Chief Connected Stores Officer David McIntosh on the commercial rationale: cart users engage with the screen for more than 30 minutes per trip, and the majority are logged in with loyalty accounts, linking the impression to verified purchase behavior tied to a specific shopper’s history. The implication for brand teams is that a smart cart display can serve category-specific offers with behavioral context that a static end-cap or checkout screen cannot match.

Grocery Dive reported in September 2024 that attribution methodology for in-cart placements was not yet standardized across the category. CPG teams building a business case for Carrefour Israel’s platform specifically should verify what closed-loop reporting the agreement will actually support; the measurement methodology will determine how the channel gets priced into a retail media plan and how its performance gets evaluated alongside other in-store formats.

What the Carrefour Group’s Data Strategy Adds

The Carrefour Israel deal sits within a group-level commitment to making data and retail media central to margin expansion. Carrefour’s 2030 strategic plan, presented in February 2026, identified retail media and data services as a core financial lever. The group has stated a target of generating an additional 200 million euros in return on investment through Carrefour Links by 2026 compared to 2021, drawing on transaction data across digital and physical touchpoints in multiple markets.

Carrefour has also been piloting the VusionGroup EdgeSense platform at a hypermarket in Villabé, France, combining approximately 70,000 electronic shelf labels, 500 cameras, and 7,000 shelf-edge rails using computer vision and AI to guide associate task prioritization and deliver personalized recommendations at shelf level. Shelf cameras detecting out-of-stock items have been deployed across 35 stores, according to Chain Store Age’s April 2026 reporting. The cart and the shelf represent two distinct vantage points on shopper behavior in the same store: the shelf camera captures what a shopper considers; the cart records what they chose. Whether those data streams will eventually connect into an integrated view accessible to CPG partners through Carrefour Links, or remain siloed across separate technology agreements with separate commercial terms, is a question the current disclosures leave open.

A2Z Cust2Mate’s January 2026 agreement with Toys “R” Us Israel and The Red Pirate, a $15 million deal covering 2,000 carts in general merchandise retail according to its press release, shows the company assembling a multi-retailer portfolio in the Israeli market as a foundation for international expansion. Carrefour Israel is the anchor in that portfolio, and the pilot results from Q3 2026 will serve as the evidence base the company takes to other Carrefour franchises and to retailers in other markets. At the time the Carrefour Israel agreement was signed, A2Z Cust2Mate reported annual revenue of approximately $7.46 million, according to GMI Research’s January 2026 smart shopping cart market report, making the $50 million five-year commitment roughly six times the company’s prior annual revenue and giving both parties a significant operational and financial stake in whether the pilot performs to the standards the May service level agreement will establish.

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