Using AI to sell near-expired goods

Bloomberg

Supermarkets are missing out on untapped revenue from selling food that’s about to expire, as store workers waste hours searching for short-dated products and discounting them by hand.

At least that’s the pitch from Too Good To Go (TGTG), an eightyear-old Danish company that cut its teeth addressing restaurant food waste and is now turning to grocery stores’ soon-to-expire goods.

Starting this month, TGTG is selling an artificial-intelligence-powered solution that assists supermarkets with expiration dates, which are a major pain point for retail food waste.

The company will begin its global rollout with the international supermarket chain Spar.

“Every day across grocery stores, staff go around and manually go through all the different products to check if anything is about to run out of date,” TGTG CEO Mette Lykke said.

Lykke described this as a time-consuming process that’s prone to errors: short-dated products are often spotted too late, and discounts meant to encourage purchasing leave potential revenue on the table, she said.

TGTG’s software factors in customer behaviour, seasonality and other considerations to estimate how likely a product is to sell in a store at any given time, then suggests a discount rate as the item approaches its expiration date.

The tool also helps workers track expiry dates such that staff only need to manually check 1% to 7% of products, Lykke said.

And it flags when food could be donated or sold at a steep discount through TGTG’s eponymous app.

The company trialled its new tool with a supermarket chain in France, where large grocery stores have since 2016 been banned from throwing away unused food that could be donated.

The grocer, which TGTG did not name, had been discounting its cheeses by 50% nationwide when they got within two days of their expiration date.

Now the store varies discounts based on region and time of year.