Price Chopper/Market 32 to use Invafresh AI forecasting to fight food waste
Price Chopper/Market 32 plans to use Invafresh artificial intelligence and machine learning to increase sales, reduce food waste and improve the experience for in-store employees and shoppers in its produce and other fresh departments.
Based in Schenectady, N.Y., the retailer runs 130 Price Chopper and Market 32 grocery stores and one Market Bistro in New York, Vermont, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, according to a news release.
Invafresh has helped Price Chopper/Market 32 to forecast, replenish orders, plan production and manage inventory by integrating in-store production data into the AI-enhanced Fresh Retail Platform. Through the Invafresh partnership, Price Chopper/Market 32 can proactively address the food waste challenge and deliver fresher food to shoppers, the release said.
“With Invafresh, we have increased sales by improving on-shelf availability and have reduced food waste by having fresher products,” Jody Plonski, Price Chopper/Market 32 senior vice president of operations, said in the release.
InvaFresh enabled in-store employees to redeploy their time to customer-facing activities, she said. The partnership has helped to prevent 20 tons of fresh food from being wasted each week across the stores.
“We know that most problems in fresh are related to forecasting the constant shifts in demand and the need to optimize and match supply and availability,” Invafresh CEO Tim Spencer said in the release. “With the intelligent forecasting and real-time analytics capabilities of our Fresh Retail Platform, Price Chopper/Market 32 has been able to address those problems and make a measurable impact on the food waste front.”
Moving to the cloud with Invafresh will help advance these tools and assist the retailer with compliance reporting, said Patrick Iannotti, director of retail operations at Price Chopper/Market 32.
“The modern user interface is both highly configurable and intuitive, making it easy to use by our in-store teammates, resulting in improved labor efficiencies,” Iannotti said in the release.
Invafresh is deployed across more than 350 grocery retailers and convenience stores, spanning a global reach of 35 countries to provide AI and machine learning, demand forecasting, merchandising, replenishment, sustainability and compliance.
