Fresh Thyme Expands to Afresh Store Ordering for Food Service, the AI-Powered System to Optimize Ordering and Inventory Management for Deli and Prepared Foods Departments

Afresh, the world’s first AI engine designed for the unique challenges of fresh grocery, announced today that Fresh Thyme Market is rolling out Afresh Store Ordering for Food Service. With this addition, Afresh gives Fresh Thyme the ability to tap into AI that is specifically built for the nuances of fresh foods to deliver high quality ordering and inventory management for deli and prepared foods. Fresh Thyme is now on track to use Afresh to order across its core fresh departments – including produce, meat, seafood as well as food service – for its entire chain of 70 stores by end of year.

“We’ve been using Afresh for a long time across many of our fresh departments, and we’re excited to add support to this busy area of our stores,” said Scott Caro, Group Vice President Merchandising and Marketing for Fresh Thyme. “Afresh has helped us be early users of AI in our store ordering, and the insights from Afresh are next level. With Afresh, we’ve been able to streamline our processes, improve efficiency for our employees and enhance the overall experience for our customers by better meeting their expectations.”

With Afresh Store Ordering for Deli and Food Service, department managers use tablets and easy-to-use guided workflows to review inventory levels and place orders. Behind the scenes, Afresh Store Ordering for Food Service taps into the same industry-leading AI data engine from Afresh that is used in other fresh departments, like produce, meat and seafood. The AI makes sense of hard-to-track factors for each fresh item – such as shelf life, seasonality, holidays, imperfect scanning at the registers and more – to deliver intelligent order recommendations and auto-orders. For prepared foods, Afresh helps store teams navigate ordering for ingredients that are used across many recipes, and it can even adjust for possible ingredient substitutions. Ultimately, this increases the likelihood that shoppers can get the items they want, while reducing the amount of food that is wasted due to inaccurate data, forecasting and ordering.

“We’re proud of our longstanding partnership with Fresh Thyme, and we’re excited to be the trusted solution to help them take their food service operations to the next level,” said Dain Charette, Chief Revenue Officer for Afresh. “In-store production makes food service a particularly critical and complex department, and we’re thrilled that our unique approach to AI-powered ordering makes it possible for grocers to order all their most complex items. This gives our partners like Fresh Thyme the ability to improve inventory accuracy, reduce waste, and, most importantly, deliver the freshest product possible to their customers.”

Grocery store fresh departments, including deli and prepared foods departments, are more important than ever. A study from Deloitte found that 68 percent of consumers say they’re willing to pay a premium for fresh food. The study also found that 64 percent of grocery retail executives say that fresh foods are the most strategically important departments for their sales growth. Afresh is helping grocers exceed shopper expectations while boosting stores’ bottom lines. Customers who use Afresh for ordering and inventory management have seen 10-40 percent more accurate inventory than traditional perpetual inventory methods. They also enjoy an average of 7 percent faster inventory turns, 20 percent increase in labor efficiency and 25 percent less shrink.

Since 2017, when Afresh’s team of data scientists launched the first AI engine for fresh grocery, they have continued to deeply study many aspects of the industry. The company’s machine learning and AI techniques have been recognized at leading AI and data science conferences, including INFORMS, where the Afresh team was the only group to present its work on the application of AI in fresh grocery. Thanks to the team’s ongoing research, Afresh’s core technology offers more fresh-specific data points and calculations than other fresh grocery solutions, making Afresh the leading technology for grocers to use AI to navigate shelf life, sales velocity, price elasticity, shifting display sizes, seasonality and incoming data quality to achieve fresher food, happier customers and healthier fresh businesses.