AUSTIN, Texas — To offer busy customers more choices and better compete with growing food options such as delivery and subscription meal kits, grocery stores are doubling down on fresh, ready-made offerings. While these products offer convenience for customers, the preparation behind the scenes can cause a manual inventory management nightmare for grocers. To help turn this obstacle into an opportunity, Oracle announced a series of new APIs and extensions for Oracle Retail Merchandising Cloud Services. With these Fresh Product Management, Ingredients Management, and Zero Waste capabilities, retailers can more efficiently allocate and account for inventory to create unique food offerings – from pre-made sandwiches to salads or baked goods – that minimize waste, while enhancing margin and customer loyalty.
“Grocers continue to expand their offerings to compete for shoppers’ hearts and minds with convenience and choice,” said Mike Webster, senior vice president, and general manager, Oracle Retail. “Enabling customers to grab a sandwich, sushi, or even a pre-made dinner gives them incentive to come into a store and spend more – but it comes with complexity for the grocer. Today, we are eliminating that hassle by enabling food retailers to better trace all fresh foods and bring together recipe management and ingredient management. This will help grocers handle production planning and execution more precisely, as well as account for the cost of labor and packaging, all within their familiar Oracle platform for modern retail.”
Request a demo to see these technologies in action here.
A fresh perspective
In grocery, “fresh” describes products carried in a store that require special handling and labor for preparation. Baking bread, slicing deli meat, or offering pre-cooked options such as rotisserie chicken, or managing short shelf-life products including those in the produce department, have special requirements to efficiently manage the planning, ordering, manufacturing, and inventory management to reduce waste.
With the Fresh Items Ingredients Management API and Zero Waste cloud service extension available for Oracle Retail Merchandising Cloud Service, grocers can manage the sourcing and procurement of the ingredients from within the store to factor in the material cost of those ingredients, inventory implications, and restocking all from easy-to-use mobile applications. For example, strawberries and blueberries from the produce section nearing the end of life, granola, and yogurt could all be flagged as items leaving a store shelf to be used in the deli section to make a parfait. Merchandising can account for the average cost of the produced items based on the current prices of the ingredient items and make all the appropriate stock ledger entries.
With these fresh management APIs and extensions, grocers can manage in-store production with complete visibility into inventory, waste, production costs, and finished goods demand, all while offering compelling new products to customers. Other benefits include:
- End-to-end inventory visibility of inventory of both the orderable ingredient and the produced sellable items
- Supporting more accurate forecasting and ordering for perishable goods and ingredient items for the store and warehouse
- The ability to improve margins by optimizing sourcing, procurement, inventory, and sales
- Better insight into additional conversion costs involved in transformation beyond the ingredients like labor and packaging
- Readily available data and intelligence to better plan assortments based on consumer, environmental, ethical, and economic factors
- Capabilities to help recognize price volatility and the need to pass the rising cost of ingredients to manufacture finished products to maintain margins
- The ability to manage shelf inventory and monitor products about to expire with freshness-ready sensors
Oracle Retail polled more than 5,000 global consumers on their grocery shopping habits last Fall and another 1,000 US consumers this winter. See what shoppers are looking for in their grocery partner here.
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