Unmanned Retail Is Coming: What the Selfly Store Acquisition Means for Husky Distributors
For nearly 70 years, Husky has sold cooling. From the first Refrigeration Centre workshop in Blackburn to a wholly owned factory in Foshan, the product has always been a fridge or freezer that does its job quietly and efficiently. That hasn’t changed. But what a fridge can do has, and the acquisition of Selfly Store is the clearest signal yet of where the Husky group is heading.
If you distribute Husky products, this matters to you. Here’s why.
What happened
In January 2025, Husky Intelligent Fridges acquired the entire share capital and business of Finnish smart vending company Selfly Store from Stora Enso. Husky Intelligent Fridges is the group’s Netherlands-based R&D centre, formed in 2018 to develop smart and unattended refrigeration, so this is very much a Husky family move, with Serge Kremer describing the deal as one where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Selfly Store is not a small bolt-on. At the time of the deal it held over 30% market share in Europe’s smart cabinet sector and had a presence in over 20 European countries, serving hotels, hospitals, EV charging stations, stadiums and workplaces. Its cabinets combine RFID, IoT, AI and cloud technology to enable 24/7 grab-and-go shopping, and in 2024 they generated 52% higher average revenue for operators than the previous year.
The group didn’t stop there. In April 2025 it added Blockstore Group, a specialist in unmanned grocery store technology, building a portfolio that runs from compact intelligent cabinets to fully autonomous grocery stores. Six months after the Selfly deal, the group’s own assessment was blunt: complementary customer portfolios, a strong joint R&D team and a shared supplier approach were already delivering results.
Why unmanned retail, and why now
The commercial logic is simple. Your customers, in hospitality, catering, workplace food and convenience retail, are all wrestling with the same two problems: staffing costs and limited opening hours. An intelligent cabinet answers both. It sells fresh, high-margin food around the clock without anyone standing behind a counter.
The numbers back this up. Demand for unmanned retail formats such as microstores and intelligent vending has surged since the pandemic, with the European sector projected to grow around 65% annually to €3.1 billion by 2031. Industry data points the same way: smart fridges and micro-markets are amongst the fastest-growing formats in European unattended retail, with smart fridges up 95% year on year in the EVA’s 2024 report, and the category has moved beyond workplaces into hotels, gyms and other venues where labour is scarce.
Whilst traditional vending sells crisps and cans, intelligent cabinets sell salads, sandwiches, ready meals and premium drinks, and they do it with real-time visibility of what’s selling, what’s expiring and what needs restocking.
What it means for you
A new category to sell into the accounts you already have. Every hotel, pub group, contract caterer, hospital and university you supply with back bar coolers and display fridges is a prospect for an intelligent cabinet. You’re not hunting for new doors; you’re widening the conversation with the ones already open.
Recurring revenue, not just box-shifting. A standard display fridge is a one-off sale with a long replacement cycle. An intelligent cabinet comes with software, data, payment integration and a merchant who needs it kept running. That changes the relationship from transaction to partnership, and it changes your margin profile with it.
Proven technology, backed by manufacturing you can trust. Selfly’s cabinets and Selfly Cloud platform have been refined across thousands of European deployments. Behind them now sits Husky’s ISO 9001 and 14001 certified factory, our British engineering team and the same energy-efficiency focus that produced the Eco Range. For a distributor, that pairing of retail software maturity and refrigeration build quality is the point.
A coherent roadmap. Selfly for cabinets, Blockstore for larger autonomous formats and Husky’s Smart Fridge controller for fleet management of conventional units. Whatever level of automation a customer is ready for, there’s a Husky answer, and a path to the next one.
The practical next step
Unmanned retail is no longer a niche experiment; it is where the growth in commercial refrigeration is concentrating. The Selfly Store acquisition puts Husky, and by extension its distributor network, at the centre of that shift rather than watching it from the sidelines.
If you’d like to understand how intelligent cabinets fit alongside your current Husky range, or which of your accounts are the best first candidates, talk to your Husky account manager or get in touch. We’ll walk you through the product, the commercial model and the support behind it.
