How Afresh uses AI to optimize fresh food storage and reduce grocery waste

Fresh food is a double-edged sword for grocery stores.

It’s one of the main reasons why customers still prefer to buy food in physical stores rather than online, but it also spoils quickly.

In 2017, Matt Schwartz founded Afresh Technologies to try to solve this problem. Based in San Francisco, the company makes software that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to help grocery retailers optimize their fresh food storage, from grocery to baked goods to meat.

As fresh foods vary in quality, are not always barcoded and are sold by weight, they require many more manual processes and human intervention.

It is much more complicated for a produce manager in a grocery store to decide how many bananas to order. They need to order with enough precision to meet consumer demand, but not enough to be left with a surplus thrown away at the end of the day. It’s a delicate balance, and not all supermarkets make good forecasts.

According to Schwartz, all grocery order optimization technology focused on shelf items, not fresh food. “We think there is a shortage of artificial intelligence in the fresh food supply chain and as of now, inventory solutions are often really inaccurate,” he explains to media interested in his company.

So when he met the co-founders of Afresh Nathan Fenner, a robotics engineer, and Volodymyr Kuleshov, a machine learning expert, at Stanford Business School, teamed up to build the first supply chain company focused exclusively on fresh food.

Technology applied to reducing food waste

Technology Afresh uses machine learning to analyze customer data and forecast product demand. Retail managers can use the software Afresh to order the exact amount of fresh food they will need, no more, no less. The company is working on a tablet-based workflow that, according to Schwartz, will integrate with the existing grocery store system. Schwartz He said that in his tests of Afresh With regional grocery chains, stores cut fresh food waste by 50% and reduced inventory by 80%.

Food waste reduction is certainly a noble and economic cause, but the value proposition of Afresh it extends far beyond that. Schwartz also hopes that by optimizing inventory, grocery stores won’t lose as much money on food waste, and can lower the cost of fresh food to make it accessible to more consumers, even those who don’t have much disposable income to spend. in fresh fruits and vegetables.

Afresh uses a SaaS model for which partners will pay a recurring fee. Schwartz It did not disclose exact numbers, but said they will charge a percentage of the money they save to each retailer by reducing their waste. Afresh is currently working on paid and unpaid pilots with multiple national grocery chains, scheduled to roll out in 2019.

Earlier this year, the company raised a $ 1.7 million investment round from Silicon Valley investors, including the founder of Baseline Ventures, Steve Anderson. The startup currently has a team of 10 people and is looking to expand.

Afresh You are not the only one working to help find a solution to the problem of food waste in grocery stores. In March, Walmart announced its Eden Technology: a suite of applications that helps suppliers optimize the distribution of fresh produce. Zest Labs developed a similar system for measuring product freshness, Zest Fresh, so similar, in fact, that they sued Walmart. The Israeli company wasteless you’re tackling the problem with a dynamic pricing algorithm that lowers food prices as they approach their expiration date.

As Afresh, Farmstead It also uses AI to optimally store grocery “microhubs” for local delivery, and recently unveiled its technology to help supermarkets, as well as coffee shops, chain restaurants and others, better manage inventory.

Afresh It is focused on the storage of groceries in physical stores but in the future its technology could be used for online stores, restaurants, canteens, etc.