Retail Insight, an AI-powered analytics platform for grocery retailers, has officially announced the launch of several new enhancements for its WasteInsight platform.
According to certain reports, these enhancements include the introduction of solutions focused on Stock Exit Management, Intelligent Donation Enablement, and Food Safety Warnings. More on that would reveal how the stated new products will join, at launch, the company’s existing expiration date management solutions i.e. Prompted Markdowns and Dynamic Markdowns to bolster WasteInsight’s impact on food waste reduction and inventory optimization.
Anyway, coming back to the new solutions, they arrive on the scene bearing a mechanism for grocers to transform food waste from a financial burden into a real strategic opportunity. This involves making it simpler to ensure food safety compliance, while simultaneously preventing chronic overstock issues before they arise.
By doing so, the stated innovations empowers retailers to boost profit margins, streamline operations, as well as meet increasingly stringent regulatory requirements for waste reduction and food safety.
To understand the significance of such a development, we must take into account how an estimated one-third of all food produced globally goes to waste,
Talk about how Retail Insight’s latest technologies will address the given problem, we begin from the Stock Exit Management solution, which conceives a data-driven approach in the context of optimizing discounts on products that are nearing the end of their lifecycle.
Considering factors like historical sales patterns and local demand trends, WasteInsight’s AI-driven dynamic pricing engine can continuously adjust markdown strategies for seasonal items, de-listed items, and overstocked SKUs. Such a mechanism can come in handy to reach upon optimal discount level, preserve margins, and clear inventory.
Next up, we must dig into Retail Insight’s bid to facilitate Intelligent Donation. This translates to a facility revolving around streamlining and standardizing store-level donation workflows. Set to work alongside Retail Insight’s predictive modeling engine, the stated feature delivers greater foresight around food recovery, as it identifies excess inventory unlikely to sell. This it does down to the store-item-date level
For instance, once an item has passed through markdown but remains unsold, it becomes eligible for donation, binning, or alternative re-use (such as animal feed). This is where Intelligent Donation Enablement solution jumps into action to simply scan items in the RI app. The idea here is to check eligibility based on retailer-defined rules.
Assuming a product qualifies, the system can immediately print a donation label to mark it for collection, thus simplifying the in-store process while supporting compliance.
On top of that, the technology generates a structured data feed of eligible items so to allow retailers to connect seamlessly with third-party donation partners or integrate into existing platforms. As donations or disposals are recorded in the app, the RI platform will also automatically sync with the retailer’s inventory system to eliminate manual reconciliation across tools.
Moving forward, the solution will take up a more predictive approach. Under this new approach, it will proactively recommend donation over markdown after identifying that excess inventory is unlikely to sell. The whole effort should reduce the number of wasted products, simplify store processes, and strengthen alignment with retailers’ sustainability and food recovery goals.
Finally, our last piece of highlight stems from a consideration for Food Safety Warnings. Retail Insight will enhance, in the present regard, in-store efficiency and ensure compliance with food safety regulations. The deployed mechanism, you see, will automatically track expiration dates and provide timely alerts for inventory which is near its expiration date.
In case that wasn’t enough, it will also warn store associates if an expiry date entered into the system falls outside the typical date range to prevent data entry errors and reduce the risk of selling mislabeled or potentially unsafe products.
“Food waste has moved from a backroom operational headache to a boardroom-level priority for U.S. grocers,” said Alex Considine Tong, Chief Product Officer of Retail Insight. “With razor-thin margins and heightened consumer scrutiny, retailers can no longer afford to treat waste as a mere line item expense. Our expanded WasteInsight platform turns this challenge into an opportunity. We’re equipping our customers with not just better visibility, but enhanced AI-driven foresight to act before stock becomes a problem.”
