U.S. grocery stores lose $18 billion in spoiled food each year. This is about 8% of fresh food and 8 million tons that ends up in landfills. After years of observing this inefficiency from the inside, Matt Schwartz teamed up with two of his friends from grad school at Stanford, Nathan Fenner and Volodymyr Kuleshov, to solve this problem in 2016. These three entrepreneurs spent thousands of hours observing grocery store managers to learn how to build a tool that could be easily integrated into the process. They use AI to predict how much produce grocery stores should order by analyzing many factors such as customer preference for certain varieties of produce at different times of the year and the effect of weather on areas where produce is growing. The data engine automates as much as possible, but it also has an interface to easily interact with store associates when necessary. The AI is also self-monitoring in order to maximize the effectiveness of the tool.
Fresh food is difficult to maintain in proper quantity because of its short life span, but Afresh is helping grocery stores have the right amounts of fresh produce at the right times to minimize waste and have the products that customers want available. Afresh is a major innovation in an area that had been stagnant for a long time. As a result, several large grocery stores have expressed in the company, and it has raised $7.8 million in investments. Many of the stores participating in the development have seen their waste cut in half. Afresh is now being used by Fresh Thyme, WinCo Foods, and Heinen’s Grocery Store. Each store pays several thousand dollars per year for Afresh, but still increasing their profits because they have the right amount of fresh produce in the store.
That’s crazy! I never knew that there was any feature like that, that stores employed! You can tell how entrepreneurial this group was by how they implemented A.I. to a market not typically associated with cutting edge technology.
Wow, that couldn’t have been easy to make! They must have been really devoted to their idea. I guess that’s a sign of them being good entrepreneurs.
This idea is amazing! It is so interesting to hear about the ideas people come up with. This truly helps the grocery industry immensely, saves money, and limits waste at the same time. Very impressive.
That’s awesome! Stores having the ability to do something like this was something i have no idea existed. This is a interesting niche found by this group using A.I technology was something unexpecting in the grocery market.
I find it really cool that they made A.I. technology to predict something that has a shelf life and based on that, how much produce to buy before it being too much of a surplus. They definitely found a problem and developed a solution that put technology to use instead of human power.
How that is mind blowing for me to hear that they can pay that much money and still be profitable for something that helps them waste less! This is a really cool example of seeing a problem that everyone writes of as natural (produce going bad) and finding a unique way to solve it!