Philips Lighting’s Affinium LED saves 60% in lighting energy costs across Tesco’s frozen food cabinets

This bespoke LED freezer lighting solution is the largest roll out of its kind to date globally, and demonstrates how working closely with the client can successfully address the multiple challenges facing retailers today.

In all, Philips has deployed the Affinium LED freezer modules replacing the interior fluorescent lighting of the supermarket’s freezer cabinet estate in more than 750 stores.  This project has reduced their freezer lighting energy by around 60% whilst at the same time ensuring excellent light quality across Tesco’s frozen food cabinets.

Today, brand image, good merchandising and profitability are more closely linked in the minds of retailers than ever before.  As Tesco stated,” we chose the Philips Affinium lighting solution as it clearly addresses our current business needs. Given the current challenging economic backdrop, the LED solution not only  makes significant inroads in reducing our operating costs but it achieves this whilst supporting our own commitment to provide customers with a better place to shop.”

Indeed, retailers clearly need their lighting to work hard for them, showing a return, not only in terms of increased business, but also in increased bottom-line profitability through reduced running costs; in simple terms, better lighting that costs less.

Tesco were very impressed with the potential cost savings and this was re enforced when supported by the fact that it’s not at the expense of reliability and longevity which are particularly important in the retail environment.  The Affinium LED freezer modules will offer Tesco a virtual zero maintenance, and is already demonstrating its reliability effectiveness in the field as discussed recently with Ken Sturgeon of Tesco.  As any retail manager knows, store image is important, and any downtime in freezer lighting or opening hours caused by maintenance issues is disruptive for customers and directly effects turnover. Minimizing maintenance impact is therefore invaluable”.

Overall, this initiative will assist in Tesco’s own targets to halve carbon emissions in its existing stores by 2020.  As customers now consider a company’s social and environmental credentials when making their purchase decisions, providing a vast array of goods and services is not enough these days.  Tesco has long since embraced this ethos, leading by example. This is particularly important given that lighting accounts for almost 20% of the world’s electricity consumption. In fact, annual energy savings per freezer are estimated to be the same as the entire 6 months electricity bill of an average household** which equate to more than 1tonne of CO2 per freezer per year contributing in the fight against climate change.

Environmental benefits are further enhanced since each Affinium LED module is expected to have a useful life of up to 6 years in store.  In comparison, fluorescent lamps are affected by factors such as continuous opening and closing of cabinet doors, and do not particularly like the freezer temperature environment which curtail useful life down to just 6 -12 months in practice. In addition, heavy duty usage sometimes means fluorescent lamps become broken inside the freezer but the Affinium LED solution means that spoilage of frozen foods and risk to customers being exposed to glass fragments is also eliminated.

Without doubt, all this adds up to a safer, more cost effective and above all sustainable environment in which to shop.