03 · Retail
Stores, supermarkets, and the energy nobody owns.
Retail estates are heterogeneous by design: flagship stores, high-street outlets, supermarkets, dark stores, concessions. Different trading hours, different refrigeration loads, different tenancy mixes. The energy bill is often paid by a franchisee or landlord while the ESG and Net Zero target sits with corporate. Wia bridges the split: every store on the same dashboard regardless of who pays the meter.
The largest energy cost in retail is refrigeration, and it is the worst-monitored cost in the building. Wia retrofits at the meter and at the refrigeration sub-circuit, separates fridge from HVAC from lighting, identifies door-open events, defrost cycles, and ghost loads, and surfaces the savings as ranked opportunities per store. Same-store year-on-year benchmarking becomes a daily view, not a quarterly report.
24/7
Refrigeration eyes-on
Per-store
Trading hours profile
Franchise-aware
Allocation by who pays
How rollout works for retail
Three steps. Trading uninterrupted.
01
Survey by store format
Stores classified by format (flagship, supermarket, c-store, dark store) and refrigeration profile. The hardware bill of materials is generated per format, not per store, so the rollout repeats cleanly across the estate.
02
Install in overnight windows
Install in the overnight closing window or during low-traffic hours. No till disruption, no fridge downtime, no impact on the trading day. Site staff, your local FM team or an electrician fit the devices, with no Wia engineer on site.
03
Operate, store-by-store
Store managers see their store, regional managers see their region, the ESG team sees the estate. Anomalies surface daily; the savings queue rebuilds every night. Day-to-day decisions stop waiting for the next quarterly review.
Inside Retail
Everything Retail brings, in one place.
Refrigeration anomaly detection
Sub-meter the refrigeration circuits and Wia surfaces fridges drifting from their expected curve before product quality is at risk. Door-open events, defrost overruns and compressor cycling are all visible per asset, with the savings opportunity quantified.
Out-of-hours waste flagging
Trading hours configured per store, per format, per shift pattern. Energy use overnight or on Sundays is flagged against the store's own pattern, not a national 9-to-5 assumption. The list of "lights still on" rolls up by region every morning.
Per-store benchmarking
Compare like-for-like stores on kWh per m², kWh per transaction, kWh per refrigerated linear metre. The outliers become a short list of stores, not a pile of spreadsheets. The estate team works on the right ones first.
HVAC + lighting modelling
Weather-normalised HVAC modelling for every store. Lighting separation where the sub-meter allows. The HVAC-vs-lighting split is the one operations teams actually act on. Wia makes it visible without an energy auditor on site.
Franchise & tenant attribution
Where stores are franchised or sub-let to concessions, Wia allocates the energy and cost to the entity paying for it. The corporate ESG view stays whole; the franchisee gets only their store; everyone runs on the same data.
Same-store year-on-year
Built-in same-store comparison: the metric the retail finance team already speaks in. New stores excluded, closed stores excluded, weather-normalised. The energy line in the trading update becomes defensible.
Retail estates across markets land on one Wia dashboard, with refrigeration, HVAC and lighting separated per store and same-store benchmarking from day one.
Refrigeration
Refrigeration is the silent giant.
In a typical supermarket, refrigeration is 40–60% of the electricity bill, and it's the worst-monitored load on the meter. Wia sub-meters per cabinet bank or chiller and flags the fridges drifting before product quality is at risk. The view below is an example week across an estate.
Catch the drift before the temperature alarm. Catch the waste before the meter read.
Works with
The systems retail operators already run on.
Wia plugs into the operational and accounting systems retail estates use to manage stores, refrigeration, and energy procurement.
Refrigeration & HVAC
- Carrier
- Daikin
- Bitzer
- Hussmann
- Danfoss
- Honeywell
Retail operations
- Oracle Retail
- SAP Retail
- NCR
- Aptos
- Cegid
- Microsoft Dynamics 365
Estate & energy
- Yardi Commercial
- MRI Retail
- Energy procurement portals
- Demand-response platforms
FAQ
Common questions
How do you handle franchise stores where we don't pay the bill?
Where the franchisee owns the bill but you own the ESG target, Wia surfaces consumption at corporate level and cost at franchisee level. The franchisee sees only their store. The retrofit is non-invasive enough that the conversation with the franchisee is short.
What about supermarket refrigeration where downtime is critical?
The retrofit sits beside the meter and the refrigeration sub-circuit. It never modifies them. Existing refrigeration controls and alarms are untouched. We add visibility; we never add a single point of failure to a fridge running product worth thousands per hour.
Can we benchmark across store formats?
Yes. Like-for-like is configurable per format (flagship, supermarket, c-store) and within format by climate band, square footage and refrigerated linear metres. The outlier list is meaningful immediately rather than swamped by format mix.
How fast can a whole estate roll out?
Rollouts run format by format, in waves by country, at the pace your local installers and overnight windows allow. The Wia team handles country onboarding and tariff data so your team can focus on local install logistics.