It’s the epidemic we’re all aware of, and yet seemingly powerless to stop: wasted food at grocery stores. For every carton of milk or loaf of bread you take home, around $2,300 worth of product is left behind every day. But there’s a new company that’s here to help. Wasteless is the new tech solution behind the so-called “Internet of Groceries” that promises to recapture one billion dollars worth of lost grocery sales every week.
It’s all contingent on what is being described as the world’s first real-time tracking solution for grocery stores, which offers customers variable pricing based on a product’s expiration date. That is to say that a carton of eggs that is set to expire at the end of the week will cost you less than the carton that has until the end of the month. This, Wasteless says, will help supermarkets sell more and waste less.
The platform constantly monitors stock levels, so if stores are running low, management can be alerted, whereas if items have been on the shelf for longer than anticipated, their prices can be automatically reduced. And it does all this by combining item-level RFID sensing, a dynamic pricing engine (which considers 43 factors including supply, demand, location, holidays, and time when calculating a price), and Electronic Shelf Labeling.
“Dynamic pricing is something used daily when booking a flight, a hotel, or an Uber, and there is no reason why our groceries should be different” said Ben Biron, founder and COO of Wasteless. “This is amazing for all stakeholders because it means lower prices for the consumer, more revenue for the supermarket, and of course, it saves our planet by significantly reducing food waste at the retail level, which accounts for 40 percent of the world’s total food waste.”
As it stands, the U.S. grocery industry loses around $57 billion every year. So yes, it most certainly does seem high time for us to waste a bit less. Currently, Wasteless is in trial with a number of retailers, and the company hopes you’ll soon see its technology in a store near you.
