Supply Chain: Afresh Launches Fresh Buying and Automates Fresh Produce Procurement for Wakefern Food Corp

Designed to modernize the work of procurement managers at grocery stores, this innovation promises to transform the way they manage their fresh food sections. For the launch of this solution, software developer Afresh has partnered with Wakefern Food Corp, a major player in the U.S. food retail industry (owner of the ShopRite, The Fresh Grocer, and Price Rite chains). The California-based company offers a concrete solution to a major challenge: ensuring the quality, freshness, and availability of products while reducing waste.

Thanks to this technology, stores now have a comprehensive, real-time view of the supply chain. Artificial intelligence helps them forecast demand, select the right suppliers, adjust orders, and respond instantly to unforeseen events—whether it’s a delivery delay, unpredictable weather, or a smaller-than-expected harvest.

Immediate, quantifiable financial and environmental benefits

The introduction of artificial intelligence in the perishable food aisles generates significant profitability gains. Unlike dry goods or frozen foods, the fresh food segment has historically experienced a high rate of shrinkage (loss of merchandise) in the retail sector. Implementing Afresh’s software suite enables a shift to a predictive model with clear performance metrics:

• 25% reduction in food waste: By mathematically adjusting order volumes to actual sales forecasts, retail outlets avoid overstocking fast-moving items, preventing tons of fruits and vegetables from rotting in storage.
• Improvement in operating margins by 2 to 3 points: The decrease in the direct markdown rate, combined with a reduction in out-of-stock incidents on the sales floor of nearly 50%, results in an immediate increase in revenue and a measurable return on investment (ROI) in less than six months per store.
• Extended shelf life: Thanks to just-in-time supply chains and streamlined logistics, fresh products gain an average of two days of shelf life at the point of sale, directly improving the end customer’s perception of quality.

As for the ShopRite teams, initial user feedback highlights a radical transformation in the daily lives of department managers. Purchasing managers emphasize the considerable time savings when preparing daily orders, as the algorithm eliminates tedious manual inventory tasks while ensuring more reliable volume estimates in the face of weather-related or promotional fluctuations.

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Fresh Buying: The Predictive Platform That Outperforms the Competition

With Fresh Buying, Afresh is adding a missing piece to its puzzle. Until now, its tools helped stores forecast sales based on demand from previous days and optimize inventory levels for fresh products. Fresh Buying goes a step further by guiding purchasing teams at the very moment they place orders, taking into account price, available volumes from each supplier, delivery times, and the actual shelf life of the products.

Whereas a purchasing manager previously had to compare multiple systems or call different wholesalers, Afresh’s tool automatically suggests the best possible order. Stores now purchase quantities that are truly tailored to their customers’ needs, receive products at the optimal time and in the right quantities, thereby preventing both stockouts and waste.

This highly specialized positioning allows Afresh to stand out from traditional inventory management systems (generic ERP systems or conventional supply chain management modules such as SAP or Oracle). These legacy software systems were designed for standardized industrial products with long shelf lives and struggle to account for the highly volatile variables associated with perishable goods (biological decay cycles, ultra-short seasonality, and daily fluctuations in wholesale prices). By focusing exclusively on the algorithmic complexity of fresh produce, Afresh creates a significant technological barrier to entry, enabling it to secure recurring contracts with the world’s largest retailers.

Consumers, for their part, will enjoy fresher fruits and vegetables that are available more often and of higher quality throughout the year. This purchasing solution complements the Afresh and Fresh Store Suite product lines, which are used to manage more than 10,000 fresh produce sections across the United States.