Afresh Uses AI To Optimize Fresh Food Stocking & Cut Grocery Waste

For brick-and-mortar grocery stores, fresh food is a double-edged sword. It’s one of the main reasons that customers still prefer food shopping in physical stores instead of online, but it also spoils quickly and can end up costing retailers some serious dough.

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

Since fresh food has variable quality, doesn’t always have bar codes, and is sold by weight, it requires a lot more manual processes and human intervention. Think: it’s a lot trickier for a produce manager at a grocery store to decide how many bananas to order than, say, boxes Cap’n Crunch cereal. They have to order exactly enough to meet consumer demand, but not so many that they’re stuck with a surplus that gets thrown away at the end of the day. It’s a delicate balance, and one that not all grocery stores are very good at striking.

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