Fresh Thyme Market adding Afresh Store Ordering for foodservice

Afresh, an artificial intelligence engine designed for fresh grocery, says 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, according to a news release. Fresh Thyme is now on track to use Afresh to order across its core fresh departments — including produce, meat, seafood as well as foodservice — 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 foodservice, department managers use tablets and easy-to-use guided workflows to review inventory levels and place orders, the release said. Behind the scenes, Afresh Store Ordering for Food Service taps into the same AI data engine that is used in other fresh departments, like produce, meat and seafood

Afresh said 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, it 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, according to the release.

Afresh offered an example of how Afresh Store Ordering streamlines deli operations for a fresh ingredient, such as tomatoes. For deli managers, it can be tricky to accurately track inventory and place orders for something as ubiquitous as a tomato, an ingredient that's used in numerous deli items from sandwiches to salad bars to prepared salads. For each of these deli items, the tomatoes are cut differently, from diced to slices, and the tomato itself may simply be bigger or smaller than the next tomato. Multiply these factors across all of the ingredients that go into every deli offering and it is easy to see how foodservice managers need a system like Afresh to make sense of every moving piece and place accurate orders, the company said.

"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, the company said. A study from Deloitte found that 68% of consumers said they're willing to pay a premium for fresh food. The study also found that 64% of grocery retail executives said that fresh foods are the most strategically important departments for their sales growth.

Afresh said it is helping grocers exceed shopper expectations while boosting stores' bottom lines. Customers who use Afresh for ordering and inventory management have seen 10-40% more accurate inventory than traditional perpetual inventory methods, the company said. They also enjoy an average of 7% faster inventory turns, 20% increase in labor efficiency and 25% less shrink, according to the release.