SAN FRANCISCO — Afresh, a leader in grocery AI technology, has announced an expansion of its platform to encompass all departments within the grocery sector, including center store, frozen, general merchandise, and health and beauty, alongside its foundational fresh perimeter operations. This development allows grocery retailers to manage replenishment, demand forecasting, inventory management, and distribution center buying on a single, grocery-native AI platform.
“For decades, grocery technology was built for packaged goods and then adapted to fresh,” said Matt Schwartz, co-founder and CEO of Afresh. “We did the opposite. We started with the hardest environment in the store: fresh — bulk produce with no barcodes, random-weight meats, and prepared foods. Once we solved those problems, extending that intelligence across the rest of the store became possible.”
The Afresh platform is now positioned as the only grocery AI solution capable of managing every item across multiple departments, including bulk and random-weight produce, subprimal meats, prepared foods, and household essentials. Over the past year, the platform has placed more than 320 million orders for shelf-stable items, representing 33% of total order volume and up to 44% in bakery departments.
Grocery departments face distinct challenges; for instance, a cereal aisle operates with stable UPCs and predictable promotional schedules, while a meat counter deals with random-weight items and limited shelf life. Afresh’s single AI engine adapts to these different operational realities through department-specific data models and workflows tailored to each department’s specific needs. This approach automates inventory and buying decisions, resulting in a 95% adherence rate among store teams to the system’s recommendations.
The expansion of Afresh addresses longstanding issues of system fragmentation within the grocery sector. Historically, retailers have struggled with disparate systems managing fresh departments, center store, and supply chain operations, often resulting in overstock and stockouts. Bruce Burrows, former CIO of Loblaw Companies Limited and Sobeys, noted, “Grocers have spent decades wrestling with system and data sprawl… Afresh took a different approach. Instead of just patching gaps, they’ve built a single AI-native system that provides a unified view across the entire supply chain.”
With the synchronization of buying, replenishment, and inventory management, grocery retailers can now execute coordinated decisions across their operations. For example, a two-week steak promotion entered at the corporate level automatically adjusts store replenishment quantities, shifts distribution center purchasing volumes, and updates production planning schedules without manual intervention.
Retailers can deploy the full Afresh platform through mobile and web applications or integrate its AI as a back-end engine within existing systems, allowing for an agile implementation timeline typically completed in under four months. This is a significant reduction compared to the 12 to 18 months required for most enterprise grocery platforms. Retailers already using Afresh can incrementally expand coverage into center-store categories without needing a new implementation.
Since its inception, Afresh has prevented over 200 million pounds of food waste. With the platform’s latest expansion, grocers can efficiently manage a range of items, from fresh produce to packaged groceries and beauty products, with a focus on precision and profitability while mitigating waste throughout the food supply chain. The era of managing fresh departments, center store, and supply chain decisions on separate systems appears to be coming to a close, as grocery AI technology takes a more central role in operations.
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