Fresh Thyme Adopts Afresh Store Ordering for Food Service
Fresh Thyme Market is rolling out Afresh Store Ordering for Food Service, which will give the food retailer the ability to tap into artificial intelligence (AI) specifically adapted to the nuances of fresh food to deliver high-quality ordering and inventory management for deli and prepared foods. Fresh Thyme is currently on track to use Afresh to order across its core fresh departments – produce, meat, seafood and foodservice – for its entire chain of 70 stores by the end of the 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,” noted Scott Caro, group VP merchandising and marketing for Downers Grove, Ill.-based 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 employ tablets and simple guided workflows to review inventory levels and place orders. The solution leverages the same Afresh AI data engine used in other fresh departments. The AI makes sense of hard-to-track factors for each fresh item, including shelf life, seasonality, holidays, imperfect scanning at the registers, and more, to offer intelligent order recommendations and auto-orders. For prepared foods, Afresh helps store teams navigate ordering for ingredients used in 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’s 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 foodservice operations to the next level,” said Dain Charette, chief revenue officer at San Francisco-based Afresh. “In-store production makes foodservice 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.”
According to Afresh, it’s 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, and they also experience an average of 7% faster inventory turns, 20% increase in labor efficiency and 25% less shrink, the provider asserted.
Afresh has established partnerships with grocers such as Albertsons, Heinen’s, Bashas’ and Cub Foods across more than 3,000 stores and 40 states.
With 70 stores in 10 states throughout the Midwest and 4,000 associates, Fresh Thyme seeks to inspire its communities through its carefully curated selection of innovative products from both established and emerging brands, fresh meat, seafood and produce offerings, and more. The healthy grocer provides shoppers an experience where discovery is encouraged, whether they’re in-store or online. The company is No. 87 on The PG 100, Progressive Grocer’s 2024 list of the top food and consumables retailers in North America.