Last week, grocery AI startup Afresh announced it is expanding beyond its original focus on the fresh food aisles to manage inventory, ordering, and replenishment across the entire store.
The company said its AI platform will now cover everything from produce and meat to center store items and general merchandise, allowing retailers to manage replenishment, demand forecasting, inventory management, and distribution center operations across all departments.
“We started in the most complex parts of the store, bulk fresh categories…some of the hardest challenges that were the least served by technology,” Schwartz said. “But grocers really want to have a simple set of systems as they could possibly have, and they wanted us to cover the whole store.”
As with the restaurant space over the past decade, digital transformation, and more recently the arrival of AI, continues to create opportunities for upstarts like Afresh to dislodge legacy technology providers in the grocery space. Oracle NetSuite and SAP Retail are old(er) school, and often more expensive, ERP suites that many grocers use today, alongside others like Blue Yonder and Manhattan Associates.
Fragmentation, along with aging technology, in the grocery tech stack has long been a problem. This expansion into becoming an inventory management tool for all sections of the store, alongside a growing roster of large grocery chain partners, positions Afresh as a potential longer-term grocery OS-type play.
According to Schwartz, the goal is still, in many ways, to reduce waste, an argument that no doubt has increasing resonance in the face of rising food prices. He estimates that Afresh’s systems are currently preventing more than 200 million pounds of food loss annually.
Looking ahead, he sees a growing opportunity for newer technologies such as agentic AI to take hold in the grocery space. “We’ve seen a lot, but we’re also still in the early stages,” Schwartz said, noting that most grocers aren’t yet equipped to run fully automated, cross-system workflows.
You can listen to my full conversation with Schwartz on The Spoon Podcast. Click play below or find it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
