Retail Insight announced enhancements to its WasteInsight platform with several new capabilities built upon the company’s existing expiration date management solutions.
"Food waste has moved from a backroom operational headache to a boardroom-level priority for U.S. grocers,” says Alex Considine Tong, chief product officer of Retail Insight. “With razor-thin margins and heightened consumer scrutiny, retailers can no longer afford to treat waste as a mere line-item expense. Our expanded WasteInsight platform turns this challenge into an opportunity. We’re equipping our customers with not just better visibility, but enhanced AI-driven foresight to act before stock becomes a problem. That’s a game-changer for retailers and a big step toward reducing both waste and risk."
Key takeaways:
· This advanced tool helps grocers transform food waste from a financial burden into a strategic opportunity, enabling retailers to ensure food safety compliance while preventing chronic overstock issues before they arise.
· Stock Exit Management gives retailers a data-driven approach to optimizing discounts on products nearing the end of their lifecycle. WasteInsight's AI-driven dynamic pricing engine continuously adjusts markdown strategies for seasonal items, de-listed items and overstocked SKUs, determining the optimal timing and discount level to preserve margins while effectively clearing inventory. The system incorporates factors like historical sales patterns and local demand trends to ensure smart, proactive inventory decisions.
· Intelligent Donation Enablement is designed to streamline and standardize store-level donation workflows. Built to complement Retail Insight’s predictive modeling engine, this feature brings greater foresight to food recovery by identifying excess inventory unlikely to sell—down to the store-item-date level. Once an item has passed through markdown but remains unsold, it becomes eligible for donation, binning, or alternative re-use (such as animal feed). With Intelligent Donation Enablement, store colleagues simply scan the item in the Retail Inight app to check eligibility based on retailer-defined rules. If the product qualifies, they can immediately print a donation label (e.g., “Charity”) to mark it for collection—simplifying the in-store process while supporting compliance.
· Looking ahead, this capability will evolve into predictive donations, where the system proactively recommends donation over markdown when it identifies that excess inventory is unlikely to sell.
· Dynamic + Prompted Markdowns with Food Safety Warnings enhances in-store efficiency while ensuring compliance with food safety regulations. This technology automatically tracks expiration dates and provides timely alerts for inventory nearing expiration. Additionally, it warns store associates if an expiry date entered into the system falls outside the typical date range, preventing data entry errors and reducing the risk of selling mislabeled or potentially unsafe products. The solution intelligently optimizes markdown timings and pricing strategies while directing store associates to the exact locations where action is needed, minimizing the time spent searching for products. This comprehensive approach not only reduces waste and protects margins but also delivers crucial food safety protection by instantly identifying potentially unsafe products, supporting both regulatory compliance and consumer safety.
