Fresh Food Inventory Management and how to meet challenges for greater success

Fresh is the fastest growing area in grocery retail today and most grocers will say they face daily struggles in their efforts to manage fresh inventory. This is especially true as consumers’ rising focus on health and traceability makes fresh food inventory management more complex than ever. Learn how grocers can meet the challenges and become more successful in fresh.

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    Most grocery retailers today face a lot of challenges when it comes to Fresh. This is typically due to having a high level of waste, which can be due to overstocking, caused by lack of visibility to inventory, as well as out of stocks, leading to missed sales.  Additionally, retailers need to be able to accurately manage demand forecasting, replenishment and take into account different demand signals, such as weather and price fluctuations.

    Symphony RetailAI is unique when it comes to managing Fresh because we do end-to-end Fresh and we can accommodate a wide variety of organizations. We break end-to-end Fresh management into five key areas.  First, we enable true fresh retail data management and demand forecasting. Which paired with AI, can account for various weather and price fluctuations and push replenishment down to the stores.  This also includes any type of daily or intra-daily forecasting and replenishment to the store.  That comes into play when you have production, whether central or in-store, and can determine within a given day. Bread items, for example, you’re going to typically produce three times a day.  So, you know how much to produce and at what time in the day.

    For the next piece, we have inventory management.  Meaning, managing from a transactional basis.  Each time you sell these goods, you deduct them from the inventory, but also track them as they are received in the stores, as something may be damaged or expired and need to be removed.  And knowing, at any point in time, where items are in your supply chain becomes very important to traceability.  For example, if there’s a recall on a specific lot number, let’s say a meat product, you need to be able to pick that and pull it from the shelf before it’s sold to your consumer.  The last piece then, is reporting and having true KPIs through business intelligence around Fresh. Within our solution, we’re able to forecast how much waste is expected within the store, so you can better determine order and pack quantities. We are very flexible and can really fit each organization and how it works with Fresh.

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