Fresh Food Retail Platform (FFRP): The Path to Sustainability & Waste Reduction for Grocery Retailers

As consumers embrace sustainability in so many aspects of their lives, one thing has become clear: grocery retailers must implement sustainable business practices to stay relevant with their customers.

Progressive Grocer asked Russ Newall, Vice President, Customer Success at Invafresh, to discuss how Fresh Food Retail Platform (FFRP) — the industry standard for fresh food retail management — helps grocers rise to the challenges their fresh departments face and contributes to improved sustainability for grocers and consumers alike.

Progressive Grocer: What are the unique sustainability challenges that grocery retailers face in fresh?

Russ Newall: First, it is important to remember that fresh isn’t just a concern for produce departments. It impacts your entire perimeter business. A key challenge for grocery retailers is fresh is time-sensitive and many grocers over order and over produce. Easily done when you are operating without having the right forecasting data to understand shifts in demand throughout the day and week. This over production leads to increased waste, reduced margins, and non-sustainable operations.

Food retailers generate 10.5 million tons of food waste, sending almost one-third of wasted food to landfills. There is a tremendous opportunity to reduce shrink to improve profits in grocery.

Fresh-centric ordering capabilities help to automate just-in-time replenishment for store backrooms based on perpetual inventory, merchandising requirements, and forecasts, to generate accurate order amounts for future inbound deliveries. This leads to 50% reduction in replenishment time, 25% reduction in backroom inventory, and 30% reduction in shrink.

PG: What would you tell grocery retailers who ask, “How can Invafresh improve my business?”

RN: To achieve a greener path to profi ts, grocers must implement the right fresh-native technology to balance demand with supply and availability. Our platform integrates vast amounts of operational data into machine learning algorithms to work as a single source of truth for decision making and operations across all points of the customer experience — demand, production, availability, and delivery.

The platform intelligently forecasts constant shifts in demand and can optimize and match supply and availability.

Understanding the data through intelligent forecasting is key. Having the right fresh centric analytics and data is the answer, to make smart decisions that help manage waste, reduce shrink, and drive sustainability.

That is exactly what FFRP empowers retailers to do. Our intelligent demand forecasting engine proactively forecasts to highlight anomalies, inefficiencies, and resource waste in operations and supply. All that and anticipates consumer demand accurately in the moment to avoid shrink and shortage