Indoor TV does not prevent waste on its own — it shortens the path between finding out that a batch is close to expiring and telling the shopper who is already inside the store. The gain is speed: the stock checker identifies the batch in the morning, records a 15 to 30 second clip on a phone, and the creative reaches every screen within minutes, with no USB stick and no waiting for someone else to upload the file. In return, the price shown on screen starts to bind the store (Brazilian Consumer Protection Code, article 30) — and the system does not read expiry dates from your ERP: the person who checked the stock decides what goes on air.
The math retail forgets
Almost every screen proposal for supermarkets arrives from the revenue side: more exposure, more impulse, bigger baskets. On perishables the faster math runs the other way. Every crate of produce that becomes shrink has already been bought, received, stored and checked — the money is gone. Selling that batch at a discount recovers part of the cost; throwing it away recovers nothing.
In the Café & Tech episode behind this article the reasoning is put plainly: "the first step is not losing anything. You only start winning when you stop losing." That is an operations statement, not marketing. It changes the question the manager asks the screen: instead of "what do I advertise today?", it becomes "what do I need to move out of stock today?".
The practical difference is that the second question has an objective answer every morning, coming from the expiry check — which is exactly why it becomes a routine, while the first one becomes a meeting topic.
Why the expiry discount never reaches the shopper today
Most stores already discount products that are close to expiring. The commercial decision is not the problem: the problem is that the message never reaches the person standing in the wrong aisle at the right moment.
- The printed sign sits in the product's own zone. Someone who never walks through produce never sees the produce offer. The sign only converts people who were already there.
- The clearance trolley has the same limit. As the episode puts it, the trolley is in produce and the shopper is in health and beauty — and the visit ends without the two ever meeting.
- In-store radio plays and nobody registers it. Audio competes with conversation, with the trolley and with the shopping list on the phone. On its own it rarely changes anyone's route through the store.
- Printed signage carries a cost nobody charges to shrink. The sign-writing job exists precisely because prices change in the morning and again in the afternoon; each cycle consumes someone's time. On a grid that changes daily because of expiry dates, that cycle never closes.
The screen solves one specific item on that list: it moves the message to where the shopper is. A creative about the yoghurt expiring today can run in the coffee aisle, in the common areas and in the checkout queue — and send the person to the island where the product actually is.
The routine that works (the operational core)
This is the part no tool delivers ready-made. Screens only work for expiry management if there is a human routine with an owner and a time. What follows is a starting design — adjust it to your sections and your stock turn.
1. Expiry check on the first shift
Someone has to walk the perishable sections early and write down what goes on today's list: product, batch, rough quantity and where it physically sits. Without that data there is nothing to advertise — and this is where most expiry-screen projects die, not in the technology.
2. The cut-off rule: how many days before
Define it per category, in writing, and review it against your shrink history. A reasonable starting point:
| Category | Goes on screen | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Produce | Same day or next day | Loss is visible and fast; the window is hours, not days |
| In-store bakery | Same day | Made that day, no shelf life beyond it |
| Deli and dairy | 3 to 5 days before | Gives the shopper time to plan the meal |
| Dry grocery | 2 to 4 weeks before | Slow turn: advertising too early only gives margin away sooner |
These windows are a starting point, not a rule. If your store turns produce faster than average, discounting early simply hands away margin you did not need to give.
3. The creative: 15 to 30 seconds, vertical, big captions, no audio
An urgency creative is not a commercial. It has to be readable from a distance, at a glance, by someone pushing a trolley. In practice: a short clip shot on a phone or a photo with large text, vertical if the screen is vertical, high contrast and no audio — the store already has in-store radio, and two sound sources competing help nobody. If you do want sound, it works better as reinforcement: a short stinger on the in-store radio when the urgency creative comes on screen.
4. The daypart grid
The same batch does not have the same chance of selling at every hour. Organising the grid by daypart improves the hit rate without deepening the discount:
- Morning: ripe fruit, yoghurt and items for immediate consumption — the morning shopper buys for the day.
- Lunchtime: quick-preparation items and ready-meal suggestions.
- Late afternoon and evening: the peak window — protein, fresh pasta, cheese, whatever goes into tonight's dinner.
To size how many creatives fit in the grid without tiring the shopper, use the dwell-time logic we detail in how long an Indoor TV loop should be.
5. Who publishes, from where — and who pulls it
This is the real bottleneck. A grid that changes daily does not survive USB sticks: with four screens that is four manual updates, done by someone walking the store with a file in hand. It is worse still when publishing depends on emailing the clip to a supplier who uploads it for you — the batch expires before the creative goes live.
With JMV Indoor, publishing happens from the cloud, on a phone: whoever checked the stock records and publishes, and the creative reaches the chosen points within minutes. The step-by-step of that operation is in managing Indoor TV from your phone, and turning a product photo into an on-screen clip is covered in product photo to Indoor TV video.
Where the screen fits in each store zone
An expiry creative should not run identically across the whole store. Three positions do different jobs:
- Aisle / fast pass-through: direct, objective promotion showing the product and where it is. Seconds of attention.
- Common areas: this is where the screen crosses sections — the shopper is in coffee and the yoghurt is expiring at the back of the store. It is the only position that changes the shopper's route.
- Checkout queue: longer attention span, good for impulse items the shopper can grab without losing their place.
The full map of what to show in each zone is in Indoor TV by store zone; the logic of growing the basket — the other side of this same ledger — is in upselling triggers on Indoor TV. If the goal is to vary the creative according to who is walking past at that instant, that is a different feature, described in Indoor TV with a camera: content by aisle.
What Indoor TV does not do
This section exists because the wrong expectation is what usually kills the project in month two.
- It does not integrate with your ERP or point-of-sale system. JMV Indoor does not read your stock.
- It does not pull expiry dates automatically. There is no "product three days from expiry enters the playlist" trigger. Entry is manual, made by whoever ran the check.
- It does not replace electronic shelf labels. If you need prices to change by themselves on the shelf, driven by the ERP, you are looking for a different product category — electronic labels, not content screens.
- It does not fix the price at the till. The screen communicates; the POS charges. If the two disagree, the store answers for it.
Put differently: the screen is the fastest communication channel the store has with the people already inside it. What goes into that channel remains a human decision.
The price on screen binds the store — and the expired-product line
Advertising expiry dates on screen brings two Brazilian rules along with it, worth knowing before the first creative goes live.
A displayed offer binds you. Under article 30 of the Brazilian Consumer Protection Code, any sufficiently precise information or advertising, conveyed by any medium, binds the supplier who runs it and becomes part of the resulting contract. Article 31 adds that the offer must provide correct, clear, precise and conspicuous information about price and shelf life. And if the store refuses to honour it, article 35, item I, lets the consumer demand specific performance on the advertised terms. A "valid for the next 30 minutes" countdown is therefore an operational promise: whoever saw the offer and reached the till has an argument. Use countdowns only when the condition is clearly written on the creative and the checkout team knows it exists.
Near-expiry is one thing; expired is another. While the date has not passed, a discounted sale is ordinary and lawful, as long as the information is clear. After the date, the nature of the situation changes: the Consumer Protection Code, article 18, paragraph 6, item I, classifies as unfit for use and consumption "products whose expiry dates have passed"; and Law 8,137/1990, article 7, item IX makes it a crime against consumer relations to sell, hold in stock for sale, offer for sale or otherwise deliver merchandise in conditions unfit for consumption, punishable by 2 to 5 years of detention or a fine (the penalty is alternative, not cumulative). The sole paragraph also punishes the negligent form of that item, with a reduced penalty.
How to measure whether it worked
Do not measure total revenue — it moves for dozens of reasons that have nothing to do with the screen, and you will end up crediting it with a result that is not its own (or missing one that is).
- Pick a single category to start with (produce is usually the most sensitive).
- Compare that category's shrink over 30 days against the same window of the previous month — and, if you can, against the same month a year earlier, so seasonality is not mistaken for effect.
- Log the routine: how many days the check actually happened, how many creatives went up and how many came down on time. Without that you do not know whether you measured the screen or the team's discipline.
- Only then scale to other sections, with the cut-off rule already tuned by what you learned.
This framing also defuses a common trap: an expiry discount reduces the margin on that item. If you measure margin alone, the screen looks like it made things worse; if you measure avoided shrink, the real gain shows up. Measure both together.
Want to try this routine in one section of your store?
The current prices and what each plan includes are always up to date on the JMV Indoor plans table — you can start with a single point, in the section with the most shrink, before rolling it out to the whole store. Prefer the context first? The full Café & Tech episode on Indoor TV in supermarkets (in Portuguese) is on YouTube.
Indoor TV is an application of digital signage at the point of sale. In supermarkets its most underrated use is not selling more: it is selling in time what is already in stock. If you are unsure how to map your points and build the expiry grid for your store, talk to us through the contact form.
Frequently asked questions
The questions below were derived from Google related searches and from the objections raised in the source episode: neither of the two SERPs measured for this topic on 19 September 2026 showed a "people also ask" box on the page.