Dive Brief:
- Artificial intelligence technology company Afresh announced Wednesday the expansion of its technology platform beyond fresh categories into center store, frozen, general merchandise, and health and beauty.
- Afresh now offers replenishment, demand forecasting, inventory management and distribution center buying for “everything that a grocer sells in their four walls,” CEO and co-founder Matt Schwartz said in an interview.
- While Afresh historically provided its products only as end-to-end applications, this expansion allows grocers to buy Afresh applications or the company’s algorithm on their own, providing “a lot more optionality for us to play nicely with the grocer’s existing systems and application,” Schwartz said.
Dive Insight:
One of the main challenges for grocers looking for a store-wide replenishment solution is that departments operate differently depending on product shelf lives — and Afresh is looking to bridge the divides retailers face by offering one solution.
“We’ve got department-specific intelligence and work, but all under one hood that covers the entire store,” Schwartz said.
Schwartz said Afresh tapped what it has learned about fresh categories — the hardest environment in a grocery store — when building out its platform to encompass the center store. Afresh had already been ordering center store items like dressings and juices for grocers’ fresh departments, Schwartz said, which helped the technology company learn specific inventory needs for those types of items, such as their larger SKU counts.
Over the past year, Afresh’s platform placed more than 320 million orders for shelf-stable items, accounting for 33% of the total order volume that the company handles, Afresh said in a press release. Afresh expanded its tech beyond produce into the meat, seafood, deli and foodservice sections in 2023.
The newest version of the company’s replenishment applications has more automation capabilities, making it more conducive to handling the higher SKU counts for center store items, Schwartz said.
With this latest expansion, Afresh can not only manage household items, such as dish shop and center store items, in addition to bulk and random-weight products, barcodeless produce and meat cuts at deli counters. Grocers can use Afresh’s platform with mobile and web applications or integrate its AI as a back-end engine within existing systems, according to the announcement.
The expansion comes just a few months after Afresh launched Fresh Store Suite in September. Through that move, Afresh added production planning and inventory management capabilities to its existing replenishment solutions.
Founded in 2017, Afresh counts Albertsons, Meijer, Stater Bros. Markets, Fresh Thyme, Brookshire Brothers and Smart & Final among its grocery clients. Afresh claims that it has prevented more than 200 million pounds of food waste.
