Inside Morrisons' new smart trolleys: what the Preston tech actually does

On 29 July 2026, Morrisons switched on something no UK supermarket had run before: a fleet of shopping trolleys that watch your basket. Drop a tin in and the trolley knows what it is. Add loose apples and it weighs them where they sit. A screen on the handle keeps a running total as you go, and at the end you tap to pay and walk out — no belt, no re-scanning, no queue. It is the biggest change to the mechanics of a supermarket trip in years, and it has landed in one store in Lancashire.

What has actually launched

The trial is at Morrisons' Riversway store in Preston, with around 30 of the trolleys available to More Card members for an initial three-month run. The technology is not Morrisons' own: the trolleys are Caper Carts, built by the US grocery-tech firm Instacart, and this is their first deployment in the UK — they are already in more than 100 cities across the United States.

If the trial goes well, Morrisons decides whether to roll it out more widely. For now it is a single store testing whether British shoppers take to it.

How a shop with one works

The experience is designed to feel like ordinary shopping, minus the checkout:

• Wake it up. Scan your Morrisons More Card on the trolley to start a session.
• Just shop. Put items straight into the basket. Cameras and a built-in scale recognise each one as it goes in — including weighing loose fruit and veg in the trolley, so there is no separate trip to a scale.
• Watch the total. The touchscreen shows a live running total, surfaces offers and More Card loyalty prices, makes recommendations, and can help you find things in the aisles.
• Skip the till. At the end, scan a barcode on the screen at a dedicated Caper lane and pay. Nothing comes back out of the trolley until you are at your car.

The point of all of it is to remove the two slowest moments of a shop — weighing produce and queuing to scan everything again — and fold them into the act of putting things in the trolley.

The technology inside

The clever part is the recognition, and it is doing a genuinely hard job. Each cart carries basket-facing and outward cameras, a weights-and-measures-certified scale, and location sensors, all feeding an NVIDIA edge-computing chip mounted on the trolley. A deep-learning model running on that chip matches what the cameras see against a database of millions of grocery items, and fuses that with the change in weight to decide what you just added — a technique the industry calls sensor fusion. Instacart says the wider system draws on more than a billion past online grocery orders to sharpen its guesses.

It is worth one honest word on the "AI" in the marketing, because it is real but narrow. Recognising a pepper or a branded box from a camera image is genuine machine learning — computer vision — and calling it a buzzword would be unfair. But it is not the reasoning, conversational AI the term now conjures; it recognises groceries, it does not think. That distinction matters less than it sounds, though, because the interesting story here is not how the cart sees your basket — it is what being able to see your basket lets a supermarket do.

Why supermarkets want this now

Two things are pulling this technology into stores at once.

The first is friction. Online shopping trained people to expect a basket total that updates as they add things and a checkout that takes one tap. Physical stores have spent years trying to match that, and a trolley that scans, weighs and totals as you go is the closest they have got. The smart-cart market is forecast to be worth around $5.94 billion in 2026, almost entirely on the promise of removing the queue.

The second is data, and it is the half the glossy launch photos tend not to mention. A trolley covered in cameras does not just see what you buy — it can see what you pick up, look at, and put back before paying, the near-misses an ordinary till never records. That stream of in-store behaviour is valuable, and the same screen that shows your running total is a place to show you a recommendation or a paid-for brand at the exact moment you are deciding. The convenience is real; so is the fact that you are shopping inside a data-and-advertising surface on wheels.

What it means for the way we shop

For shoppers, the pitch is genuinely appealing — no queue, no double-handling, and a running total that, more than any feature here, helps keep a shop on budget. But two caveats are worth carrying into the aisle.

The first is that the same features designed to help can also loosen the purse strings: research into smart trolleys has found shoppers using them tend to spend more, not less, partly because the screen's prompts and recommendations are working on you the whole time. The running total pulls one way; the suggestions pull the other.

The second is narrower but ours: a Caper Cart only knows Morrisons' prices. Its total is accurate and its recommendations are helpful, but both are sealed inside one shop. The screen is very good at telling you what this trolley costs. It has no reason to tell you the same basket might be cheaper somewhere else — which is the one question a running total can never answer, and exactly the one PriceLens exists to.

What to take from it

• Morrisons' Preston trolleys are Instacart Caper Carts — a UK first, ~30 carts, More Card members only, on a three-month trial from 29 July 2026.
• They recognise items with cameras, a scale and on-cart machine learning, weigh produce as you go, show a live total, and let you pay without a checkout.
• Supermarkets want them for two reasons: removing the queue, and seeing in-store behaviour they have never been able to measure before.
• The running total is the feature most likely to help your budget — but it only knows one shop, and studies suggest smart-trolley shoppers spend more overall. Worth a try; worth going in with your eyes open.

Details of the Preston pilot and the Caper Cart technology are drawn from Morrisons' and Instacart's launch announcements, contemporaneous UK retail-trade coverage, and smart-cart market reporting (2024–2026). Trial terms, cart numbers and availability may change.