In the grocery industry, managing the produce aisle has always been a race against the clock, where shelf life is measured in mere days and financial margins are razor-thin.
While many U.S. retailers treat surplus or cosmetically imperfect fruits and vegetables as a late-evening write-off, their U.K. counterparts have long treated waste mitigation as a disciplined, morning operational routine. In this Q&A, Alex Considine Tong, chief product officer for Retail Insight, outlines the valuable lessons U.S. grocers can learn from the U.K.’s highly scrutinized market.
Drawing on data from over 700 grocers, Considine Tong explains how shifting from rigid expiration dates to predictive, morning sell-through signals can help store teams intervene proactively. By adopting these proven British practices and applying smart inventory reconciliation to non-bar-coded items, U.S. grocers can seamlessly merge sustainability with commercial survival — capturing shopper intent while the product is still fresh.
The Packer: Markdown windows are a major lever for sustainability. But in the produce aisle, where shelf life is measured in days rather than weeks, how can U.S. retailers use store-level data to identify the exact “tipping point” for a bag of salad or a crate of peaches before they become unsellable?
Considine Tong: The challenge with produce is that the tipping point isn’t stamped on the packaging. A printed date tells you when something expires; it doesn’t tell you whether you’re going to sell it before then. That gap between “it’s still within date” and “it’s still going to sell” is where a lot of produce waste actually happens.
What I’ve seen work well is moving away from date-only triggers and toward sell-through signals. If you combine how quickly a product is moving at the shelf, what hourly sales rates look like relative to the stock on hand and how many days of life remain, you get a much sharper picture of where the real risk sits. A bagged salad with three days left but a sell-through trajectory of 60% needs attention today, not tomorrow evening.
With WasteInsight, that kind of signal surfaces as a clear action for the store team: Mark this down now, while it’s still desirable, rather than waiting until it’s close to the bin. That timing distinction matters both for waste and for margin. A 20% markdown at 10 a.m. moves product. A 50% markdown at 7 p.m. saves very little.
The other piece is ordering. When sell-through signals feed back into buying decisions, teams start to see where they’ve been consistently over-ordering certain lines and can pull back before the problem repeats. That’s where the sustainability and the commercial discipline converge.
There is a common perception in U.S. that ESG (environmental, social and governance) initiatives are a luxury for stable economies. Given your visibility into 700-plus grocers, can you provide a specific example of how financial discipline and sustainability converge specifically within the produce department? How does reducing shrink directly buffer a retailer against inflation?
There’s a tendency in some conversations to treat sustainability and margin as separate priorities, something you focus on when times are good and trade off when costs are rising. From what I see across hundreds of grocers, that’s exactly the wrong framing. In produce particularly, they’re the same conversation.
Produce is one of the highest-shrink categories in grocery. When fruit or vegetables spoil before they’re sold, retailers have already paid for that product. The cost is locked in. The only question is whether they recover any revenue from it or write it off entirely. In an environment where procurement, logistics and energy costs are all climbing, every unit that reaches a shopper’s basket instead of the bin is directly offsetting that pressure.
What I consistently see is that a large share of produce shrink is avoidable. It tends to come from three places: markdowns that happen too late to drive sell-through, stock that’s in the backroom rather than on the shelf and ordering patterns that repeat last week’s mistake rather than adjusting to what actually sold. Addressing those three things doesn’t require a sustainability budget; it requires better timing and better signals.
The retailers managing this well have moved from treating markdowns as an end-of-day clean-up to treating them as a proactive margin lever earlier in the day, while the product is still fresh and shoppers still have intent to buy. In inflationary conditions, recovering that margin on a consistent basis adds up considerably.
The U.K. is noted for having higher regulatory and public scrutiny. What is one specific “exit rule” or “ordering behavior” common in U.K. produce departments that U.S. grocers have yet to adopt but could implement tomorrow to see an immediate drop in waste?
One of the clearest behavioral differences I’ve observed between U.K. and U.S. grocery operations is how markdowns are timed. Part of what drives this in U.K. is the regulatory and public scrutiny environment: food waste reporting obligations and retailer sustainability commitments are far more embedded in U.K. grocery than they currently are in U.S., which means store teams and buyers are held more visibly accountable for what ends up in the bin. That accountability has shaped how the industry thinks about markdowns, not as a loss-recovery tool but as a routine operational discipline.
In many U.K. produce departments, the markdown decision is tied to sell-through progress at a defined point in the day, not to how close a product is to its end of life. The discipline I’ve seen is essentially: If a product hasn’t hit a certain sell-through threshold by midmorning, it gets a controlled price reduction while it’s still fresh and there’s still footfall to take advantage of it.
The contrast with common U.S. practice is stark. Markdowns often happen late in the evening, when sell-through is already a lost cause. By that point, you’re discounting because the product is about to expire, not because you’re trying to move it. That’s the difference between a commercial intervention and a write-off with a yellow sticker on it.
The ordering side of this is equally important. U.K. teams I’ve spoken with often run tighter guardrails on short-life replenishment, adjusting volume based on recent sell-through and waste rather than repeating the same order regardless of what moved. If yesterday’s data shows a line underperformed, today’s order adjusts. That sounds straightforward, but it requires the right signals reaching the right people quickly enough to act.
Both of these are changes U.S. retailers could make without waiting for a major systems transformation. The tools to surface those signals exist. The bigger shift is cultural: treating the markdown decision as something that happens at 10 a.m. based on data rather than at 9 p.m. based on what’s still on the shelf.
Produce often lacks the rigid bar codes and tracking of dry goods (think bulk apples or loose greens). How does Retail Insight help grocers solve the inventory inaccuracy problem for non-bar-coded items, and what impact does that accuracy have on preventing over-ordering?
Non-bar-coded produce is genuinely one of the harder parts of fresh inventory management. With packaged goods, you have a scan at the till that tells you a unit left the store. With loose apples or bulk salad greens, that unit-level signal often doesn’t exist in the same way, which means the store’s system may have a very different view of what’s on hand versus what’s actually sitting on the shelf or in the backroom.
What we focus on is building a clearer picture from the signals that do exist: deliveries, expected sales curves for that line and that day, markdown activity, waste recorded by the store team. Taken together, these give a working reconciliation of where inventory should be against how the product is actually selling. That reconciliation won’t always be perfect for every loose item, but it’s considerably more actionable than any single data point in isolation.
Where this matters most practically is in identifying discrepancies early. If expected sell-through and actual sales are diverging for a short-life produce line, that’s a signal worth acting on before the product runs out of time. And from an ordering perspective, visibility into those patterns helps store teams and buyers understand where they’re consistently ordering more than they sell, which is one of the most persistent drivers of produce waste.
The principle I keep coming back to is this: Better ordering prevents waste more reliably than any markdown. Markdowns recover value from product that’s already at risk. Better inventory signals stop you buying more risk than you need to in the first place.
In U.K., “wonky” or “ugly” produce campaigns are mainstream. From a data perspective, do you see a missed opportunity for U.S. retailers to use dynamic markdowns for aesthetically imperfect produce earlier in the day, rather than waiting until the item is at the end of its life cycle?
Yes, and I think it’s a bigger opportunity than most U.S. operators currently recognize. In U.K., wonky or imperfect produce ranges have become a mainstream category; there are shoppers who actively look for them as a value option. That normalizes the idea that cosmetically imperfect doesn’t mean nutritionally inferior or unsafe, and it opens up a whole sell-through window that U.S. grocery stores largely aren’t using.
The data question is about timing and early identification. Product that’s slightly misshapen or cosmetically off tends to move more slowly at full price, which means it builds up sell-through risk faster than standard lines. When you can see that risk accumulating earlier in the day, you have options: a modest markdown in the morning when footfall is high, better placement at the shelf or a clearer price signal to shoppers who are already looking for value.
What I observe in stores that handle this well is that the markdown doesn’t need to be deep to be effective. The value for the shopper in a morning markdown on imperfect produce isn’t the dramatic discount; it’s the availability and the freshness. That’s a very different proposition to a steep end-of-day reduction on something that’s been sitting on the shelf all day and is approaching its final hours.
The broader opportunity for U.S. retailers is to stop treating produce markdowns as a loss-recovery mechanism and start treating them as an active sell-through tool. The earlier you intervene with the right product at the right price point, the more revenue you recover and the less ends up as shrink.
