From self-checkout misses to concealed items and checkout skipping, retail loss is becoming more complex, more expensive and harder to spot.

According to the British Retail Consortium’s latest annual crime survey, customer theft cost retailers a record £2.2bn in 2023/24, while overall spending on prevention reached £1.8bn. Taken together, that pushed the total cost of retail crime to £4.2bn. At the same time, violence and abuse against retail workers climbed to more than 2,000 incidents a day, underlining just how wide-ranging the issue has become.

Food retail has always had a complicated relationship with loss. High footfall, high transaction volumes, busy stores, fast-moving products and, increasingly, a patchwork of self-checkouts, scan-and-go journeys and traditional tills operating side by side, are a recipe for some product to simply vanish.

The result is a store environment where shrink isn’t confined to one obvious moment. It can happen in the aisle, at self-checkout, at the manned till or at the exit. Some of it is deliberate. Some of it is accidental. All of it adds up.

For years, many retailers have focused loss prevention efforts around the checkout itself. That made sense when the till was the clearest point of control. But the modern grocery journey is less linear than it used to be, and so is the loss attached to it.

A customer might fail to scan an item at self-checkout. A product could be hidden before the shopper even reaches the front of store. A shopper using scan and go may leave something out, whether intentionally or not. And in a stretched labour environment, store teams are often expected to manage all of that while keeping queues down and customer experience intact.

That tension is what is driving renewed interest in smarter loss prevention technology. Retailers don’t just want more cameras or more alarms. They want better visibility. More specifically, they want to understand what happened between the shelf and the transaction.

That was one of the themes emerging from EuroShop 2026 in Düsseldorf, where suppliers and technology firms spent much of the event focusing on efficiency, automation and store control. Among the companies drawing attention was Trigo, which is positioning its loss prevention offer around a simple but commercially powerful idea, using a retailer’s existing CCTV infrastructure to compare what shoppers take from shelves with what they actually pay for.

That sense of momentum has also been helped by industry recognition. Earlier this year, Trigo was named a top supplier in retail at the 2026 Retail Technology Awards Europe, after German supermarket chain Netto Marken-Discount won in the artificial intelligence category for its use of the company’s loss prevention technology.

Presented by the EHI Retail Institute, the awards recognised the use of AI and computer vision to give retailers greater visibility over loss in real time, while keeping disruption to the shopping journey to a minimum. For Trigo, the win adds some third-party weight to a part of the market where retailers are often wary of bold claims and looking instead for proven use cases and operational value.

It’s a proposition designed to address one of the central frustrations in modern loss prevention. Most stores already have cameras. Most already have point-of-sale data. But too often those systems sit in parallel rather than working together in a meaningful way.

Trigo’s pitch is that by linking in-store activity to checkout transactions, retailers can move beyond isolated incident monitoring and towards something more holistic. In practice, that means identifying discrepancies such as non-scans at self-checkout, items concealed before payment, checkout skipping, scan-and-go losses and even missed scans or ‘sweethearting’ at manned tills.

The appeal is obvious. Retailers are under intense pressure to reduce shrink, but they’re equally wary of introducing friction into the shopping trip. Nobody wants a store environment that feels hostile, over-policed or operationally clumsy. That is especially true in grocery, where convenience and speed remain essential.

Tools that work in the background therefore have a clear advantage. Rather than adding more visible hardware or forcing shoppers through yet another intervention, the next wave of loss prevention is increasingly about using existing infrastructure more intelligently.

That doesn’t mean technology is a silver bullet. Retail shrink is rarely caused by one thing alone, and no single system will solve the entire problem. Organised theft, opportunistic shoplifting, staffing pressures, scanning errors and store design all play a role. There is also a wider question for retailers around how data, alerts and evidence are actually used once they are generated. Detection is only useful if stores have the processes and people in place to act on it.

Still, the direction of travel is clear. As loss becomes more distributed across the shopping journey, retailers are looking for solutions that do the same. Monitoring only the final checkout moment is starting to look outdated in a market where the problem begins much earlier.

That’s where Trigo is carving a more distinctive position. Rather than relying only on behavioural cues or suspicious movements, its approach combines scan pattern detection, product-level verification and aisle-to-checkout tracking. In other words, it’s not just asking whether someone behaved oddly at the till. It’s asking whether the item that left the shelf was ever properly paid for.

For grocers, some of the biggest sources of loss don’t always look dramatic. A missed scan. An item left underneath a basket. A product held in hand and forgotten at checkout. A concealment that is not obvious from a checkout-facing camera. These are small moments, but scaled across hundreds of stores and thousands of transactions, they become materially significant.

There’s also a financial logic to solutions that sit on top of existing infrastructure rather than demanding major new capital investment. In a period when retailers remain cautious on spend, any technology that promises to work with current CCTV networks, avoid large-scale hardware rollouts and prove value in one location before a wider rollout will get attention.

That, arguably, is why loss prevention has moved up the agenda again. It’s not just about catching thieves but recovering margin, supporting staff, understanding store blind spots and making sure operational investment actually delivers a return.

The challenge for suppliers in this space is to avoid overselling. Retailers have heard plenty of grand claims before. What they want now is evidence, practical deployment and a clear sense of how a system fits into the realities of a live store estate.

But the broader point stands. As retail crime rises and the cost of shrink continues to bite, grocers are being forced to rethink where loss really happens and what modern prevention should look like.

The answer is unlikely to be more of the same. More likely, it will come from joining up the systems retailers already have, and finally getting a clearer view of what is happening between the moment a product leaves the shelf and the moment a shopper leaves the store.

Click here find out more about how Trigo can improve your loss prevention strategy