Back-end and operational technology

Kroger said it is testing Flashfood’s food waste reduction solution in 16 Richmond, Virginia-area stores. 

Customers will have the ability to purchase foods in surplus or nearing their best-by date from across categories at a discounted price through the Flashfood app.

Flashfood hopes to expand the partnership with Kroger beyond Richmond in the next three to four months, Flashfood CEO Jordan Schenck said in an interview. Schenck said Flashfood plays well into Kroger’s Zero Hunger | Zero Waste initiative, which is the grocery company’s in-house effort to tackle food waste and improve food accessibility. Flashfood “fits squarely in that… [as] we answer both sides of the equation,” Schenck said. 

Kroger stated in its 2024 Environmental, Social and Governance report that it aims to have “100% of [its] retail stores actively donating surplus fresh food by 2025.” The grocery company plans to divert 95% of the more than 166,000 tons of food waste it expects to generate in 2025. By comparison, the company diverted just under 52% of the more than 265,000 tons of food waste it generated in 2023.

As the Kroger pilot expands, the grocer will receive more updated technology from Flashfood, including its new partner app. The app, which launched in beta in July, includes updated analytics and more dynamic pricing opportunities for its retail partners with AI-driven and predictive insights, according to Schenck. The updated app will roll out across Flashfood’s operations later in 2025, she said. 

Richmond is a “net-new area and region for Flashfood,” Schenck said. 

Kroger marks the first major partnership Flashfood has announced since Schenck stepped into the CEO role in early May. She is the first woman to helm the technology company. Flashfood has established partnerships with a number of grocers, including Meijer, Family Fare, Loblaw, Tops Friendly Markets and Giant Eagle. 

The Kroger partnership “does signal where we’ve grown as a business in a much more meaningful way,” Schenck said. “It does help really bolster where we are heading as we grow up as a company and then also grow up as a company in tech in grocery.”

As United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI) strives to continue building sales momentum, the grocery company has launched a partnership with startup GreenChoice to provide independent retailers with technology that provides shoppers with a range of details about foods they carry.

Through the arrangement, announced in May, GreenChoice supplies grocers with a system that lets them print customized shelf labels that feature a score reflecting multiple health- and sustainability-focused factors for each item. Retailers can also use the system to integrate the score and details about goods into their e-commerce platforms.

GreenChoice has compiled details about more than 1 million foods and works directly with grocers to develop customized shelf label designs that include the company’s ratings as well as a QR code that shoppers can scan to call up additional details about products, said Galen Karlan-Mason, founder and CEO of GreenChoice.

The system can also recommend products to shoppers based on their personal preferences and health characteristics. GreenChoice offers a white-label app that grocers can use to allow shoppers to access GreenChoice’s ratings, which it calls GreenScores. The scores fall between 0 and 100 and incorporate factors like nutritional quality, sustainability and ingredient safety.

The rating system is reminiscent of nutrition labeling systems like Guiding Stars and NuVal that retailers have incorporated in the past, but is notable for its focus on independent retailers and for the ways it combines nutrition and sustainability information for shoppers.

UNFI provides GreenChoice’s system to retailers through a unit that offers tools to grocers it serves as a wholesaler. The grocery company began showing off GreenChoice’s technology at its spring and summer selling show for suppliers and retailers in January, and around 12 retailers are currently using the technology, Matt Eckhouse, president of UNFI Digital and Professional Services, said in an emailed statement.

UNFI did not indicate whether it intends to deploy GreenChoice’s technology at its own retail locations, which include grocery stores under the Cub and Shoppers banners.

GreenChoice also works with grocers directly, said Karlan-Mason, who came up with the idea that led to the company’s formation while a graduate business student at Brandeis University. The company is focused on partnering with smaller grocers that might not have the resources to implement technological advances on their own, he said.

The company, which was founded in 2019 and has so far raised about $1 million from investors, currently supplies its system to about 40 retailers, according to Karlan-Mason.

One of the grocers GreenChoice serves is Frazier Farms Market, a three-store natural foods chain with locations in La Mesa, Oceanside and Vista, California. The grocer has been working with GreenChoice for about a year, said owner Matt Frazier.

“It gives people an opportunity to make a choice or to change their mind, or to gain more knowledge or information” on a product’s ingredients, how it was produced or its nutritional qualities, Frazier said.

Frazier Farms sources some products from UNFI, but began its relationship with GreenChoice on its own, Frazier said.

Frazier added that his employees are used to personally helping shoppers decide which products to buy, which helped drive his interest in adding GreenChoice’s technology.

“It’s something that I think you’re going to start seeing other stores move to [so] we thought, ‘Why not get ahead of it?’” Frazier said.

Learner Limbach, chief cooperative officer of Orcas Food Co-op in Eastsound, Washington, which is also using GreenChoice’s technology, said he appreciates the ability to provide shoppers with information he and his small team do not have the time to research themselves. Like Frazier Farms, the co-op is a UNFI customer but began working with GreenChoice outside of its relationship with the wholesaler.

Orcas, which runs two locations and serves the San Juan Islands, currently uses GreenChoice’s system on its two e-commerce sites, which serve individual shoppers and businesses looking to buy goods by the case, Limbach said. The co-op plans to roll out shelf labels that include GreenChoice’s ratings soon and also intends to integrate the scores into digital tags at a later point, he said.

Instacart announced in March that it added a new technology, Store View, that uses artificial intelligence and computer vision to collect real-time data on shelf inventory.

The company also added the ability for a worker at a second location of a retailer selected by a customer to check for out-of-stock items. Instacart noted that because more than half of orders are accepted by workers already at or near a store, another worker can quickly check to see if the requested item is available. 

Instacart also said it plans to equip its Caper Carts with outward-facing cameras to provide real-time inventory updates as often as every hour in some stores, but did not say when that would happen.

Instacart’s in-store technology announcement comes as grocers continue to grapple with how to solve the major headache of out-of-stocks, which can lead to inadequate substitutions that dampen the online shopping experience for shoppers.

As much as 60% of inventory records are inaccurate, according to a study by ECR Retail Loss Group that Instacart cited in a blog post. About 5% of Instacart customers are not happy with the replacement items they receive, Instacart said.

Instacart said the Store View technology and second store check option are possible because of the company’s integrations with retail partners’ inventory systems and its army of roughly 600,000 workers, who collect over 10 million data points daily. 

For Store View, eligible workers will have access to a new earning opportunity where they take videos of store shelves aisle by aisle that Instacart’s Store View technology then analyzes. This technology will identify what’s available, what’s out of stock and what’s running low, and help refine Instacart’s predictive models, the blog post noted. 

Store View will launch with select retailers before scaling to more retailers across the U.S. and Canada throughout 2025, Instacart said.

For the secondary store check, Instacart will automatically ask another worker to check if an item is available at another nearby location when the worker handling an order cannot find the product at the store they’re shopping at. 

Second Store Check will roll out across the Instacart marketplace in the coming months. The option will appear when a customer’s order needs help from a second shopper, Instacart said.

Walmart announced in February that it will use software that calculates climate risk and provides price forecasting for categories like produce.

Walmart aims to improve its evaluation of medium- and long-term climate risks for the global agricultural supply chain with the software provided by Helios AI, which predicts the price and availability of agricultural commodities using climate risk and artificial intelligence.

The partnership comes at a time when Walmart, which has more than 4,600 locations in the U.S. and handles thousands of produce SKUs daily, says it’s looking to strengthen its food supply chain.

The USDA has estimated that 30% of food loss occurs during agricultural production and harvest, and flags unpredictable weather as a key driver of food loss.

Alongside the new partnership, Helios announced a new suite of features that include the ability to assess climate risk and provide weather projections for a year into the future as well as the ability to change the timeframe of charts and key performance indicators, instead of pre-defined timeframes, according to the announcement. 

The company also plans to provide historical pricing and price estimates for fruits and vegetables with the upcoming addition of global, country and regional averages and ranges. Customers will be able to interact with prices by origin region or shipping point and analyze prices by variety, grade and organic status.

The partnership stemmed from Helios winning Walmart’s 11th annual Open Call competition for entrepreneurs, making it the first Walmart Open Call winner in the software category. The pitch event, during which companies met with the retailer’s merchants, took place at Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, in September 2024. 

In spring 2024, Walmart announced it would pilot agriculture technology that provides real-time information on crops and can improve sourcing decisions around produce. That partnership with crop supply intelligence company Agritask uses remote sensing and data analytics tools in various regions in the U.S. and Mexico to provide hyperlocal information on blackberry and cherry crops grown by certain suppliers.

Food Lion has started using location-tracking technology from artificial intelligence provider Flybuy to improve the efficiency and convenience of its curbside pickup service, the companies announced in July. 

Flybuy’s technology assists store employees in ensuring orders are ready when shoppers arrive to collect them by tracking people’s location when they are en route to the store. In addition to helping reduce wait times for customers, the system enables stores to more efficiently use order staging areas and parking spots designated for pickup, according to the companies. The platform also helps associates better manage their time by providing insight into when orders need to be ready. 

Food Lion has already seen customer wait times decrease by more than 40% by using Flybuy’s system, an improvement that has led to a “notable rise” in customer satisfaction, according to the announcement.

The grocer is following fellow Ahold Delhaize-owned supermarket chains Giant Food, The Giant Company, Stop & Shop and Hannaford in incorporating Flybuy’s technology into its operations.

Food Lion also works with third-party e-commerce providers like Instacart and DoorDash.

Food Lion is infusing its pickup service, known as Food Lion To Go, with FlyBuy’s technology at a time when Ahold Delhaize has been dealing with sluggish online sales growth in the U.S. But while the Netherlands-based grocery company’s overall digital sales were down stateside in all four quarters of fiscal year 2024, Food Lion turned in double-digit e-commerce sales growth for the year. Food Lion’s online sales were up by almost 40% during Ahold Delhaize’s most recent quarter.

Food Lion is also Ahold Delhaize’s best-performing U.S. banner as measured by comparable-store sales. The chain, which operates over 1,100 supermarkets in 10 states, has posted 50 consecutive quarters of comparable-store sales growth.

Wakefern Food Corp. and retail in-store communications company VoCoVo partnered to introduce new headsets for ShopRite’s staffers across 30 locations, according to a May announcement. 

VoCoVo’s Series 5 Pro Headsets are wireless and offer voice communication technology that enables employees to more easily communicate with each other and receive real-time updates.

Wakefern first introduced VoCoVo technology to a handful of stores in late 2024 and has continued to accelerate deployment, Chris McCrae, Wakefern’s retail innovation lead, said in a statement.

Wakerfern tapped VoCoVo to equip its stores with automated cross-store communication, which it did not previously have, said Joe Szala, VoCoVo’s senior vice president of sales. These capabilities allow workers to better stay in touch with each other as well as keep up with operational ongoings and assist customers.

The VoCoVo headsets Wakefern introduced enable person-to-person communication, which allows workers to talk “one-to-one, one-to-many [and] one-to-a-group,” Szala said. The devices also allow anyone with the headset to access speed dial as well as answer, transfer or put calls on hold rather than needing one person to operate all the store’s phone lines. 

The headsets offer secure communication. They are also waterproof, dustproof, impact-resistant, can withstand extreme temperatures and have a 40-hour standby time per charge, according to the press release. 

Setup of the headsets for the select ShopRite stores required six weeks of “pre-work,” Szala said, then installation, which takes a few hours in-store. 

Post-installation, Wakefern and VoCoVo touch base weekly to ensure all systems are still working accordingly, Szala said. 

There are two additional functions available on the headsets that Wakefern has not included in its 30-store rollout of the technology. One is built around “smart APIs,” which connect cameras to the headsets to offer automated alerts on operations like delivery arrivals, shelf out-of-stock or security issues. The second taps into AI functions and essentially acts like Siri, Szala said, adding that employees can ask it questions and receive automated, up-to-date answers.   

Szala did not provide details on when or if Wakefern would introduce these two additional functionalities to stores.