Optimize Your Fresh Retail Operations with Production Planning

Optimize Fresh Retail with Production Planning

For the past few decades, grocery retail supply chains focused their efforts on increasing efficacy on more cost-focused strategies to deliver high volumes at lower prices. Nowadays, though there is still pressure on price, consumer demands are forcing grocers to supply higher quality, better for the environment, greater variety and innovative products to the market.  

To meet these demands, it has become more important than ever for stores to plan, validate, schedule, and improve their efficacy through innovative tools and modern technology.  

Unfortunately, increasingly complex demands bring their own challenges, and this often calls for out-of-the-box solutions.  

Some new challenges you may face are:

Reduce Shrink

Challenge: 

Due to the evolving needs and preferences of everyday consumers, stores have had to drastically increase their number of SKUs. This makes it tougher than ever to reduce shrink and wasted product. 

Solution: 

  • Use accurate, fresh-centric data to provide just-in-time recommendations, taking the guesswork out of inventory management and making it easier for stores to manage and meet the needs of today’s consumers. 

Optimize Inventory, Increase On-Shelf Availability, and Maximize Fresh Food Margins 

Challenge: 

Restocking and eliminating excess overstock is costly and complex – especially for fresh departments with poorly or manually managed fresh ordering and replenishment processes.  

Solutions: 

  • Gain the ability to track, measure, and alert on out-of-stock fresh retail items produced in-store (after and before they happen) to retain high sales opportunities while aligning to just-in-time production that reduces chances of excess shrink. 
  • Leverage accurate, fresh forecasting-based configurable production cycles to meet any demand window, centralized merchandising direction, and perpetual retail inventory. 

Crush Your Fresh Production Goals 

Challenge: 

Ready-Made, Grab & Go, Pre-Cut, Pre-Prepared – the vocabulary of the grocery store has changed considerably. Moreover, the introduction of commissary or central kitchen operations has increased the complexity of production operations. Yet, on top of all that, traceability of products from farm to fork continues to be important to both consumers and retailers.  

Solutions: 

  • Extend in-store production planning support to your commissary operations, providing you with a centralized approach to recipe management, quality control, pricing, sourcing, labeling, and other activities. 
  • Generate multi-stage production plans and accurate ingredient pick lists to ensure the most efficient and time-saving execution of production performed within fresh grocery categories. 
  • Achieve economies of scale while maintaining quality control and traceability over production to better manage labor resources in your commissary and in-store operations. 

Enhancing Your Operational Intelligence 

Challenge: 

For retailers, survival in a post-pandemic society means working hard to support their customers and employees. This includes embracing innovative technology to improve operational intelligence and team connections, as well as equipping them with smarter tools to keep them feeling engaged and valued. 

Solutions: 

  • Robust reporting tools are a necessity to grow today’s fresh operations. Leverage a variety of built-in production planning KPIs such as improving the accuracy of inventory data through standardized reporting guidelines. 
  • Measure the quality of in-store operator performance to align with the retailer’s best practices, which will reinforce the core principle that “good execution equals good results”. 
  • Incorporate better training strategies by using smarter tools. This increases the skill set of employees and gives value to the organization, helping employees feel they have begun a career in retail rather than just an hourly job. 

With this multitude of challenges, a fresh-centric solution is essential for driving sustainability, eliminating guesswork in ordering and replenishment, standardizing in-store production planning, and improving operational intelligence.  

Adapting to an ever-changing world can seem overwhelming, but our team of Freshologists is ready to show you how our industry leading Fresh Retail Platform can help with just-in-time production processes.

Ready to continue the conversation?

Book your Demo

About Invafresh

With a combined 500+ years of Freshology experience, the heritage of Invafresh has enabled fresh food retailers to create extraordinary store operations performance and differentiated customer experiences. As the leader of Freshology, Invafresh is deployed in over 350 grocery retailers spanning a global reach of 35 countries with more than $100 million of Fresh revenue being transacted daily, to provide AI/ML demand forecasting, merchandising, replenishment, and sustainability and compliance solutions.  

Learn more at About Us | Invafresh.

Written by

Published on

Share This Article

Back to all Posts

Learn more about being Best in Fresh​