Afresh, the grocery AI company that built its platform around fresh department complexity, has announced that its system covers every department in the store — including center store, frozen, general merchandise, health and beauty and the full fresh perimeter — on a single platform.
The expansion makes Afresh the only grocery AI platform capable of managing replenishment, demand forecasting, inventory and distribution center buying across every item type, from bulk produce with no barcodes to dish soap and shampoo.
Built on fresh, extended outward
Afresh CEO and Co-Founder Matt Schwartz said the sequencing of the company’s development — starting with fresh rather than packaged goods — is what made the full-store expansion credible.
“For decades, grocery technology was built for packaged goods and then adapted to fresh. 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,” Schwartz said.
The expansion isn’t new territory in practice. Over the past year, the platform placed more than 320 million orders for shelf-stable items. Those items now account for 33 percent of total order volume across the platform – and as much as 44 percent in bakery departments, where center store ingredients are purchased alongside fresh production items.
One engine, department-specific logic
The platform runs a single AI engine but applies department-specific data models and workflows. In produce, it maintains inventory accuracy without constant manual recounting. In meat and seafood, it handles random-weight and cutting decisions within the ordering workflow. In bakery and prepared foods, it aligns buying and production with daily demand and batch timing.
The company said store teams follow platform recommendations at a 95 percent or higher adherence rate across all item types.
A coordinated buying example: 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 manual handoffs between systems.
The Fragmentation Problem
Bruce Burrows, former CIO of Loblaw Companies Limited and Sobeys, said the platform addresses a structural problem that has long made enterprise grocery operations difficult to manage.
“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. 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,” Burrows said.
Implementation and Integration
Retailers can deploy the full platform with mobile and web applications, or integrate Afresh’s AI as a back-end engine within existing systems without rebuilding their technology stack. The company said most enterprise grocery platforms take 12 to 18 months to implement; Afresh deployments typically complete in under four months without external system integrators.
Grocers already using Afresh in fresh departments can expand to center store categories incrementally without a new implementation cycle.
Afresh operates across more than 12,000 departments in 40 states. Retail partners include Albertsons Companies, Brookshire Brothers, Stater Bros., Meijer and Wakefern. The company said it has prevented more than 200 million pounds of food waste since its founding in 2017.
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