Edeka Nordbayern-Sachsen-Thüringen is running a Diska supermarket in two modes: a conventional staffed shop by day and an unattended self-service store after employees leave.
According to Retail Optimiser, the pilot is the roughly 825-square-meter Diska in Obermaßfeld-Grimmenthal, southern Thuringia. Weekday staffing runs from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Outside that window, shoppers enter with a payment card, use the regular assortment and pay at self-checkout. Anystore provides the smart-store technology.
The store does not treat autonomy as a total conversion. Fruit and vegetables are still weighed and labeled by the customer before checkout. Alcohol remains in a controlled area that requires a separate age check with an identity card or driving license. Unattended shopping is cashless. Those rules are built into the hybrid format.
Staffed hours keep people on site to handle exceptions. After close of staffing, entry is authenticated, restricted products follow a machine-readable age path, checkout is self-service, and unresolved problems cannot become open-ended transactions.
Anystore’s stack at the site, as described in that report, includes access control, digital signage, speakers, age-verification equipment, video and sensor systems, and self-checkout terminals. A central Retail Hub monitors components and combines data on entry, transactions, devices, network status and customer movement.
Retail Optimiser reports that more than 30 Edeka stores across several regional organizations already use Anystore technology, while the vendor says it has equipped 135 markets for autonomous or partly autonomous operation. The Obermaßfeld-Grimmenthal site is described as the first hybrid food store operated directly by the Edeka Nordbayern-Sachsen-Thüringen wholesaling organization, rather than only a test by an independent merchant.
That matters inside Edeka’s federated structure, where regional companies and independent merchants often choose technology separately. A regional wholesaler trying a repeatable setup could point toward banner-level standardization instead of one-off projects.
The location sits near a railway station, with potential demand from commuters and travelers outside typical shopping hours. A hybrid model is most useful where extra hours add sales without justifying a second full staffing shift. Results still turn on incremental sales, shrink, remote-support cost and how often unattended shopping hits an exception the system cannot close.
The test is whether an ordinary discount supermarket can switch operating states without being rebuilt as a fully autonomous box. If it can, the same refrigeration, shelves and inventory can run more hours while labor stays concentrated where staff add the most value.