We created a modern, high-performance platform for a leading Irish supermarket chain, automating receipt verification with AI to manage dual-brand campaigns and offer customers weekly prizes.
Musgrave Group Ltd., a prominent Irish food wholesaler and the country's largest grocery distributor, sought to revolutionize customer engagement for its leading retail brands, SuperValu and Centra.
Aiming to strengthen their presence in the Northern Ireland market, they required a solution that moved beyond manual promotional entries to a high-speed, automated digital experience. We were tasked with building a scalable, AI-driven platform that allows users to upload supermarket receipts to enter weekly and campaign-level prize draws seamlessly.
Through Brandfire, we partnered with Musgrave to deliver this innovative loyalty solution. Prior to this development, managing digital promotions at scale presented significant operational hurdles.
Similar to previous retail reward systems, traditional manual verification was turning into a bottleneck, making updates slow and limiting the ability to run multiple brands on one platform. Managing a growing base of promotional entries across parallel builds for SuperValu and Centra had become a complex challenge.
Our client needed a modern, reliable platform development that could automate verification, handle the scale of dual-brand campaigns, and offer a smoother experience for both users and administrators. Key challenges with existing methods included:
Hence, the client wanted to fix more than just the tech. They wanted to rebuild the experience around their customers, create a seamless rewards journey powered by AI, and make the platform highly efficient for their internal teams to manage through a robust administrative interface.
Our client wanted to create a multi-brand loyalty and rewards experience that could scale without manual limitations and drive deeper brand affinity through active customer participation. The existing reliance on traditional promotional methods was functional but far from future-ready. Managing thousands of receipts manually had become a bottleneck, making it difficult for the marketing team to execute rapid, seasonal campaigns that fostered ongoing brand engagement across parallel retail brands.
The goal was to move beyond manual verification and build a modern loyalty platform that offered AI-driven speed, absolute data reliability, and high-tier administrative control. Musgrave sought an automated ecosystem where customers could enjoy an effortless "upload-and-win" loyalty journey, while their internal team managed complex rules, like store-specific prize pools and exclusion logic through a powerful new centralized dashboard.
At the same time, the platform needed to automate receipt validation to identify store locations, confirm spend thresholds, and ensure eligibility. With high submission volumes expected across multiple participating locations, manual handling was no longer sustainable to maintain a seamless user experience.
The new rewards platform had to:
In short, the vision was to build a high-performance loyalty platform that rewarded customers in real time, reduced admin effort by leveraging AI, and reflected a modern approach to customer engagement.
RaftLabs was outstanding at addressing our complex platform needs, delivering a stable, high-performance loyalty application that has been genuinely loved by the customers.
We built a cross-functional team to manage the complex transition from traditional promotion methods to a scalable AI-driven architecture. This structure ensured seamless communication between technical engineering and business objectives, keeping the focus on automated reliability.
The team included:
We followed an agile workflow with iterative builds, ensuring the specific seasonal requirements for both SuperValu and Centra brands remained synchronized.
Regular feedback loops with Brandfire allowed for rapid adjustments to the administrative winner selection tools and AI confidence thresholds.
A major technical hurdle was developing an AI engine that could accurately validate receipts across multiple retailers while excluding specific items like PayPoint, fuel, and tobacco in real-time.
Our backend and QA teams worked closely to refine the OCR logic, ensuring the system could reliably identify counties and store locations from diverse receipt formats.
This collaborative approach allowed us to resolve performance bottlenecks before go-live, delivering a stable and robust loyalty platform.
This project was a true collaboration between RaftLabs and Brandfire. While Brandfire led the brand identity and creative direction for SuperValu and Centra's loyalty and rewards platform, our team at RaftLabs focused on the technical architecture and AI implementation.
Behind the scenes, the platform operates with intelligent automation to handle high volumes of loyalty proof-of-purchase data. Users from SuperValu and Centra interact with independent, mobile-responsive web apps tailored to their specific brand, while the underlying technical core remains centralized for maximum operational efficiency.
The engine runs on a systematic validation logic specifically designed for the loyalty program. When a user uploads a receipt to enter a competition, the Vertex AI OCR engine scans for key metadata including the store name, purchase date, and transaction totals.
The backend then applies strictly sequential logic, filtering out entries that do not meet the loyalty threshold of €10 minimum spend or those that include prohibited items such as fuel or tobacco. Validated receipts are then processed through a winner management tool that automatically draws 10 winners per store each week, ensuring fairness and regional coverage for loyal customers across 9 participating locations.
To maintain high standards of reporting and compliance, the system monitors total entries and pending validations daily. It generates activity logs for the admin team to review through a centralized loyalty dashboard, keeping data current and organized.
Weekly syncs and shared roadmaps helped both RaftLabs and Brandfire maintain close alignment during multi-brand seasonal loyalty launches.
Participants can visit the campaign URL to submit their email address and upload a grocery receipt. The registration flow captures explicit user consent for future marketing, ensuring all new entries are recorded with a verifiable GDPR audit trail.
An integrated AI engine uses OCR to automatically extract the store name, transaction date, and total amount from uploaded images. This eliminates the need for manual spend verification, instantly validating receipts against the €10 minimum threshold and excluding prohibited items like fuel or tobacco.
Admins manage the two independent brand experiences (SuperValu and Centra) through a single, centralized system. This allows brand managers to create unique seasonal campaigns, upload bespoke brand banners, and manage competition content for both supermarkets from one admin interface.
The platform hosts weekly prize draws where receipts are verified against specific date windows. Admins use randomized draw tools to select 10 winners per store per week across multiple supermarket locations, ensuring fairness and engagement for loyal customers.
The centralized dashboard enables admins to perform randomized draws and publish results for both weekly competitions and grand campaign prizes. "Winners Coming Soon" placeholders display automatically until results are confirmed and published by the team.
Super admins have full control over campaigns, participating store lists, and user data. The dashboard provides real-time oversight of active campaigns, pending receipt validations, and approved winners, allowing for manual intervention when AI confidence scores are low.
Integrated reporting tools display live summaries of entries and validations. Admins can export comprehensive CSV reports containing user email addresses, validation status, and opt-in flags for marketing analysis.
The platform is designed with mobile/tablet-responsive layouts to ensure a seamless upload experience on any device. Backend monitoring ensures high uptime during submission spikes, with empty-state messaging rendered cleanly when no active competitions are available.
The new AI-powered loyalty platform launched seamlessly with zero downtime. Users from across Northern Ireland began participating almost immediately, with seasonal branding for SuperValu and Centra drawing in high traffic volumes.
During the first week alone, the system successfully managed a surge of 471 users and validated 573 physical receipts. By the end of the initial four-week campaign, the platform had registered a total of 1,062 users and processed 1,610 receipts. The high speed of the AI validation engine and the mobile-friendly design encouraged customers to interact more frequently, leading to the successful selection of 76 winners in the first seven days.
For Musgrave, managing independent brands became highly efficient through the centralized admin panel. The ability to track daily submission trends and oversee automated receipt validation in one place simplified complex retail operations. With 99.9% uptime maintained since go-live, the platform has transformed from a simple competition tool into a robust, high-performance loyalty ecosystem that strengthens the connection between Musgrave’s brands and their customers every day.
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The goal was to replace slow, manual receipt verification with an AI-powered system that could validate thousands of entries instantly, support two major retail brands (SuperValu and Centra), and deliver a modern, seamless rewards experience for customers.
The platform uses OCR to scan uploaded receipts and extract details like store name, transaction date, and total spend. It then applies validation rules such as minimum spend, store match, and exclusion of prohibited items, to determine eligibility automatically.
Yes. We have developed loyalty platforms for other major brands like Aldi, Instantor and Energia. While those platforms handled standard receipt verification and campaigns effectively, they did not include AI-powered automation. Our solution for Musgrave’s SuperValu and Centra goes further by automating receipt validation, preventing fraud in real time, and handling multi-brand campaigns at scale.
We utilized Vertex AI by Google for the core AI processing, specifically for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract critical data like store name, purchase amount, and date from the user-uploaded receipts.
Modern loyalty platforms are built on scalable architectures, often using cloud-based or serverless technologies that can handle sudden spikes in traffic and thousands of simultaneous user interactions. They are designed to process high volumes of entries, automate validation, and manage multiple campaigns or brands without slowing down, ensuring a seamless experience for both customers and administrators.
The estimated cost range for building a similar fully-featured, market-ready loyalty platform that is well-designed and ready to scale is generally between USD 20,000 and 40,000+.
You can easily understand the financial impact of launching a loyalty platform by using our ROI Calculator, which projects results based on your real business numbers. The tool helps you estimate:
By entering a few key metrics like transaction volume, customer participation rates, and campaign duration, you’ll get a personalized ROI projection built around your retail brand’s scale and growth goals.
Yes. We build custom loyalty solutions that integrate seamlessly with your existing POS system, no matter which industry you’re in. We build platforms that connect directly to your POS to capture real-time purchase data, automate rewards, validate transactions, and run high-volume campaigns without manual effort.
We support a wide range of industries, including:
Yes. We have successfully leveraged this powerful OCR and automation technology to streamline core business operations in other sectors. For a detailed look at how we applied a similar AI architecture to automate back-office tasks, check out our case study on building a gas station management software.
