National Retail Federation Partners with Sensormatic to Maximize ROI at NRF 2025

As the National Retail Federation’s flagship event, NRF 2025: Retail’s Big Show attracted more than 40,000 retail-industry professionals from over 6,000 brands to its 2025 event in New York City. Within NRF’s “Big Show” was the future of food tech: the Foodservice Innovation Zone, fusing commerce and cuisine and featuring the latest innovations at the intersection of food and retail.

“The food service industry has seen some of the biggest retail innovations in recent years, and being able to showcase the changes and evolutions across food service technology was paramount,” said Susan Newman, senior vice president of event strategy for the National Retail Federation. “At the same time, major changes are happening in retail sectors like convenience, such as the inclusion of electric vehicle charging ports at gas stations. Customers stay longer while their vehicles charge, and those retailers have an opportunity to capitalize on the increased dwell time.”

But capitalizing on these changing trends and behaviors, Newman stressed, will require these retailers to rethink how they engage with their customers — and people-counting solutions, like the one NRF deployed in partnership with the traffic team at Sensormatic Solutions, will be key for accomplishing that.

The NRF team knew that showcasing the true power — and potential ROI — of today’s leading retail technology solutions would mean delivering meaningful, actionable insights on customer behaviors, preferences and traffic patterns.

“Every retailer today is concerned about ROI on the solutions they implement,” Newman said. “People-counting solutions provide indisputable ROI for any organization that wants to understand their traffic and its downstream impacts across everything from profitability to the customer experience.”

Of course, NRF was also eager to see a return on its own investment in the Foodservice Innovation Zone. This meant understanding how long attendees lingered in the event space, which exhibitors and displays they interacted with and for how long, and even how they moved through the space itself.

“Customer preferences and perceptions change so quickly today, and that includes our own attendees,” Newman said. “Just like any major retailer, we wanted a data-driven solution that could tell us what our attendees wanted and where they were getting the most value.”

Answering these crucial questions about attendee behavior and foot traffic within the Foodservice Innovation Zone would be no easy task, but the NRF team soon found the right partner in Sensormatic Solutions’ ShopperTrak Analytics, a leading people-counting solution trusted by retailers worldwide.

By leveraging ShopperTrak Analytics’ People Counting solution from Sensormatic’s Traffic Insights portfolio, NRF was able to track attendance volumes, dwell time, and more. And rather than receiving disparate, after-the-fact reports, they were instead able to receive these insights in real-time.

That’s because solutions like ShopperTrak Analytics aggregate powerful sets of data into a single, centralized location, empowering the NRF team to understand user behaviors and traffic changes within the Foodservice Innovation Zone.

“We were impressed with the data that ShopperTrak Analytics delivered,” Newman noted. “The insights we received helped us validate our assumptions about what our attendees wanted and were interested in, and they also helped us make a powerful case to retailers on the value of people-counting technology. ShopperTrak Analytics turned out to be a perfect fit for what we wanted to accomplish within the Foodservice Innovation Zone, and the data it delivered consistently exceeded our expectations.”

ShopperTrak Analytics may have helped NRF understand attendance and benchmark their performance at this year’s Foodservice Innovation Zone, but, Newman noted, the biggest ROI may be yet to come.

“There’s immense value in understanding traffic data and shopper behaviors,” she said. “But now, thanks to Sensormatic, we have the ability to apply those insights and turn that data into decisions for next year’s event.”

Of course, measuring traffic and understanding guest behaviors may be a vital step for Newman and the team at NRF, but it’s just the first of many.

“Just like any leading retailer, we know that customization and personalized experiences are key. We are eager to take this data and build on it. Ultimately, we want to push the envelope and be able to deliver even better, more meaningful experiences in the years to come.”

To find out more about how ShopperTrak Analytics and the entire portfolio of Traffic Insights solutions from Sensormatic can help you improve in-store performance and even get maximum ROI for your next event, just get in touch. Our team is ready to help you choose, implement, and optimize the right people-counting solutions for your needs today.

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Sensormatic Solutions, the leading global retail solutions portfolio of Johnson Controls, powers safe, secure and seamless retail experiences. For more than 50 years, the brand has been at the forefront of the industry’s fast-moving technology adoption, redefining retail operations on a global scale and turning insights into actions. Sensormatic Solutions delivers an interconnected ecosystem of loss prevention, inventory intelligence and traffic insight solutions, along with our services and partners to enable retailers worldwide to innovate and elevate with precision, connecting data-driven outcomes that shape retail’s future. Please visit Sensormatic Solutions or follow us on LinkedIn, X, and our YouTube channel.