Balls Foods, the independent grocery chain behind Hen House, Price Chopper, SunFresh and Payless, has selected Afresh for production planning and store ordering across the entire store. The retailer will use Afresh in produce, meat, deli and bakery, and across all fresh departments plus grocery, frozen, dairy, alcohol and general merchandise.
The platform replaces handwritten production guides, manual order writing, legacy CAO and inconsistent perpetual inventory with AI that builds production plans and writes orders based on real-time inventory, item-specific perishability and store-specific demand. Afresh handles the full complexity of fresh categories, where recipes and ingredients move between departments and timing matters as much as quantity.
On the same system, a single decision accounts for everything: how many chickens the deli should roast, when to roast them to meet rotisserie demand and how many to shred for chicken salad and barbecue chicken.
“For years, we’ve managed our departments with limited data, manual production guides and ordering that required experience to fill holes,” said Chris Foltz, EVP of merchandising and marketing at Balls Foods. “Afresh gives us production plans our store teams can trust, with the same intelligence running ordering across the store. It’s not merely a better version of what we had – it’s a foundation we’ve never had before.”
“Most grocery technology was built from the center store out, then extended into fresh,” said Matt Schwartz, CEO of Afresh. “Afresh started by training our AI on billions of fresh data points, building a foundation capable of solving the toughest inventory and forecasting challenges in retail. That’s what allows retailers like Balls Foods to build an AI-first tech stack that unifies fresh, in-store production and center store on a single platform.”
About Afresh
Afresh is the AI platform for grocery, built to help grocers make smarter decisions about what to buy, order, produce and sell across their entire operation. Founded in 2017, Afresh supports more than 12,500 departments across 40 states, partnering with Albertsons Companies, Stater Bros., Meijer and Wakefern.
About Balls Foods Stores
Founded in 1923, Balls Foods operates 25 supermarkets in the Kansas City metropolitan area under the Hen House Market, Price Chopper, Sun Fresh and Payless Discount Foods banners.