Afresh Expands AI Platform Beyond Fresh to Cover Every Item in the Store

Afresh's AI platform now manages replenishment, inventory, and DC buying decisions across center store and general merchandise — already ordering more than 320 million center store items annually.

SAN FRANCISCO, March 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Afresh, the leading grocery AI company, today announced the expansion of the Afresh platform to every department across the grocery enterprise — including center store, frozen, general merchandise, and health and beauty, in addition to the fresh perimeter where Afresh built its foundation.

Grocers can now manage replenishment, demand forecasting, inventory management, and distribution center buying across every department on a single grocery-native AI platform.

"For decades, grocery technology was built for packaged goods and then adapted to fresh," said Matt Schwartz, co-founder and CEO of Afresh. "We did the opposite. We started with the hardest environment in the store: fresh — bulk produce with no barcodes, random-weight meats, and prepared foods. Once we solved those problems, extending that intelligence across the rest of the store became possible. With today's expansion, grocers can run inventory, replenishment, and buying decisions across the entire store on one purpose-built grocery AI platform."

This makes Afresh the only grocery AI platform capable of managing every item across departments, including:

• Bulk and random-weight produce with no barcodes
• Subprimal meat and deli counter cuts
• Prepared food and ingredient items for hot bars and bakery
• Refrigerated items such as milk and packaged cheese
• Packaged grocery items, including pasta and frozen dinners
• Dish soap and other household essentials
• Shampoo, conditioner, and beauty products

Afresh's expansion across all departments builds on its existing experience managing packaged goods within fresh departments. Over the past year, the platform placed more than 320 million orders for shelf-stable items. These items now represent 33% of total order volume, and as much as 44% in bakery departments.

One Platform, Department-Specific Intelligence

Grocery departments operate under very different constraints. A cereal aisle runs on stable UPCs, long shelf lives, case-pack ordering, and predictable promotional schedules. A meat counter and prepared foods program has to handle random-weight items, in-store production, and products with limited shelf life.

Afresh was built to handle those differences. The platform runs a single AI engine, but adapts to the different ways work happens across the store through department-specific data models and workflows tuned to each department's labor model. It automates inventory and buying decisions across center store and fresh departments: in produce, it helps teams keep inventory accurate without constant recounting; in meat and seafood, it builds case-pack, random-weight, and cutting decisions directly into ordering; and in bakery and prepared foods, it aligns buying and production with daily demand and batch timing — reducing manual calculations and mid-shift replanning.

This department-specific understanding is what makes the system work, and why store teams follow recommendations at a 95%+ adherence rate across all item types. The result is something grocers haven't had before: department-specific intelligence on a single system, with a shared view of inventory, demand, and buying decisions from the DC to the shelf.

Ending System Fragmentation in Grocery

Grocery retailers have historically managed fresh departments, center store, and supply chain operations across a patchwork of disconnected systems. That fragmentation makes it difficult to coordinate decisions across merchandising, distribution, and store operations — and often results in overstock, out-of-stocks, and shrink that compound across the supply chain.

"Grocers have spent decades wrestling with system and data sprawl, trying to force fragmented data to talk across platforms that were never designed to connect. It's made getting a complete picture of the business nearly impossible," said Bruce Burrows, former CIO of Loblaw Companies Limited and Sobeys. "Afresh took a different approach. Instead of just patching gaps, they've built a single AI-native system that provides a unified view across the entire supply chain."

When buying, replenishment, and inventory run on the same system, that coordination changes immediately. A two-week steak promotion entered at the corporate level automatically adjusts store replenishment quantities, shifts DC purchasing volumes, and updates production planning schedules — without a single manual handoff between

Built to Fit Your Existing Systems

Retailers can deploy the full Afresh platform with mobile and web applications, or integrate the platform's AI as a back-end engine within existing systems — without rebuilding their entire technology stack. Most enterprise grocery platforms require 12 to 18 months to implement. Afresh deployments are typically completed in under four months, without external system integrators.

Retailers already using Afresh in fresh departments can expand coverage into center-store categories incrementally, without a new implementation.

Afresh has prevented more than 200 million pounds of food waste since its founding. With today's expansion, grocers can manage every item — from a head of lettuce to a box of cereal to a tube of shampoo — with the same level of precision and profitability while reducing waste across the food supply chain.

The era of managing fresh departments, center store, and supply chain decisions on separate systems is over.

About Afresh

Afresh is the world's leading Grocery AI company, purpose-built for how grocery stores actually operate — from fresh department to center store items, and stores to distribution centers. Its platform helps grocers decide what to buy, order, produce, and sell across the entire operation. The result is higher profits, less waste, and fresher food on the shelf. Founded in 2017 with the mission to eliminate food waste and make fresh food accessible to all, Afresh today supports operations in more than 12,000 departments across 40 states. Partners include Albertsons Companies, Brookshire Brothers, Stater Bros., Meijer, and Wakefern. Learn more at www.afresh.com.

SOURCE Afresh Technologies