Wasteless, winner of FoodBytes! NYC 2018 “Highly Commended Award,” will introduce the world’s first machine-learning solution for grocery stores to North America at NRF 2019 Retail’s BIG Show in NYC Jan. 13-15, Booth #4437. Wasteless, headquartered in Israel and the Netherlands, is the inventor of a patented markdown optimization engine for perishable goods with a limited expiration date, enabling retailers to maximize profit across the demand curve. With Wasteless’ proprietary technology, retailers are no longer reliant on price reductions, guesstimated mark downs and adaptations done tediously by hand. This radical idea for North American commerce also addresses one of the major environmental and social disasters of our time: food waste.
For grocery retailers, food waste represents an $18.2 billion opportunity. On average, the value of wasted food in retail is equal to roughly double the profits from food sales. Designed to integrate easily with supermarkets’ existing IT infrastructures, the turnkey solution is already a success story in many European and Israeli stores, where it’s proven to increase retailer revenues and reduce waste.
Expiration dates cause almost all retail food waste. The value of a food item decreases as it gets closer to its expiration date, yet the price remains the same. There is no incentive for consumers to choose an older item over a later expiring product. The Wasteless algorithm updates prices for items based on their expiration dates, giving consumers a lower price for products closer to expiring, effectively reducing the amount of food wasted and increasing close-to-expiration sales for retailers. Significantly reducing retail labor, such as shelf checks and pricing updates, Wasteless seamlessly creates pinpointed price-reductions multiple times per day for all items – not just one – close to their expiration dates. Who wins? Both the shopper and the retailer.
In November 2017, an international Spanish retailer selected Wasteless to assess whether Wasteless' Dynamic Pricing technology could help improve the key critical elements in the retailer's operations. Data analysis shows the Wasteless system was able to increase revenue by an average of 6.3 percent, and decrease overall store waste by an average of 32.7 percent. Likewise, the average monthly waste per product went from 2.8 units to an average of 2.14 units.
