Dive Brief:
- Grocery Outlet is deploying a multi-category ordering solution from artificial intelligence technology company Afresh, according to a Wednesday announcement.
- With the partnership, Grocery Outlet will use Afresh across its fresh, center store and general merchandise departments.
- The partnership comes at a time when Grocery Outlet is looking to modernize its supply chain inventory management and ordering, Afresh Chief Revenue Officer Adam Litle said in an interview.
Dive Insight:
Afresh said the tie-up will help Grocery Outlet reduce shrink and improve margins. Litle noted that, across its partnerships, Afresh has seen workers halve the time they spend on orders while retailers, on average, increase sales by 3% and reduce shrink by 25%.
The discounter is the first retailer to use Afresh’s full-store, multi-category technology, which the tech vendor unveiled earlier this year after initially focusing on rolling out solutions for fresh perimeter categories.
“This investment is about simplifying and modernizing operations for our independent operators, and equipping stores with world-class tools that help them make smarter decisions every day,” Frank Kerr, chief store operations officer at Grocery Outlet, said in a statement.
Grocery Outlet considered various vendors, and Afresh stood out because of the flexibility that its AI-powered technology provides for retailers with quick-changing assortments, Litle said.
“A part of the reason [Grocery Outlet] chose us is because there’s also a lot of metrics and information in our dashboards where they can get real-time information at an organization level and a store level all the way down to an item level,” Litle said.
Grocery Outlet has approximately 550 stores across 16 states. Afresh noted that its technology provides each of Grocery Outlet’s stores with recommendations based on their own demand patterns and that store operators will only need to review inventory that Afresh’s system flags. Litle noted that Afresh’s adherence rate — the measure of how closely supply chain operations align with planned targets — is 94%.
Grocery Outlet’s corporate teams will have visibility into store-level ordering and performance, Afresh noted.
