AI rapidly transforms modern world through computer science combined with robust datasets. It enables problem-solving, predictions and machine learning, allowing us, humans, to concentrate on more pressing business areas. AI can make decision, recommendations and predictions influencing real or virtual environments. Before you even knew it, Artificial Intelligence has already entered grocery stores across the world, including a US-based customer of ours. In this article, we'll review how AI can support a grocery business through quality, stock and spoilage control of fresh produce.
In the past (or at present for majority of supermarkets and grocery stores) store employees shared responsibility to conduct quality checks for fresh products, such as vegetables and fruit. If the case runs out of apples, it has to be spotted and refilled/swapped with a new case from the warehouse to avoid missing out on business. Fresh produce also tends to rot, and a single rotting apple can ruin the whole box of healthy apples, if left unnoticed.
With a simple AI camera, mounted in front of the fresh vegetable bin with an AI model installed to perform volumetric and color detection of apples, bananas, avocados etc. - the AI model computes the amount and quality of vegetables in the bin in real time, and send this information to customer's dashboard portal. If a shopper comes in and purchases vegetables or fruit by removing them from the bin, the fresh food manager will notice this change due to the automatic updates that reflect the fact that there's now less vegetables left in the bin, and will be able to make the decision about restocking those items.
Another important function of our solution is analytics of a series of time - data snapshots of the vegetables in the bin over time. The store staff can use this to improve their supply chain management based on deep analytical insights around busy shop hours, seasonality of fresh produce and so on.
As unreal as this might sound, such solution is not as expensive as you might think. Get in touch with our sales team to get a personalized quote and take your fresh inventory to the next level!