AI-powered enhancements help grocery retailers slash food waste, boost sustainability, and drive profitability.

Retail Insight, an AI-powered analytics platform for grocery retailers, announced significant enhancements to its WasteInsight platform with several powerful new capabilities—Stock Exit Management, Intelligent Donation Enablement, and Food Safety Warnings. These new features build upon the company’s existing expiration date management solutions, Prompted Markdowns and Dynamic Markdowns, further expanding WasteInsight’s impact on food waste reduction and inventory optimization.

This advanced tool helps grocers transform food waste from a financial burden into a strategic opportunity, enabling retailers to ensure food safety compliance while preventing chronic overstock issues before they arise.

In an era where approximately one-third of all food produced globally goes to waste, these AI-driven insights enable retailers to simultaneously boost profit margins, streamline operations, and meet increasingly stringent regulatory requirements for waste reduction and food safety. The platform delivers on the emerging reality that waste reduction has become a key performance indicator carrying as much strategic weight as revenue growth and customer loyalty.

“Food waste has moved from a backroom operational headache to a boardroom-level priority for U.S. grocers,” said Alex Considine Tong, Chief Product Officer of Retail Insight. “With razor-thin margins and heightened consumer scrutiny, retailers can no longer afford to treat waste as a mere line item expense. Our expanded WasteInsight platform turns this challenge into an opportunity. We’re equipping our customers with not just better visibility, but enhanced AI-driven foresight to act before stock becomes a problem. That’s a game-changer for retailers and a big step toward reducing both waste and risk.”

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Stock Exit Management: Unlike traditional markdown approaches that are often haphazard and too late, this feature gives retailers a data-driven approach to optimizing discounts on products nearing the end of their lifecycle. WasteInsight’s AI-driven dynamic pricing engine continuously adjusts markdown strategies for seasonal items, de-listed items and overstocked SKUs, determining the optimal timing and discount level to preserve margins while effectively clearing inventory. The system incorporates factors like historical sales patterns and local demand trends to ensure smart, proactive inventory decisions.

Intelligent Donation Enablement: One of the most impactful enhancements coming to WasteInsight is Intelligent Donation Enablement, a capability designed to streamline and standardize store-level donation workflows. Built to complement Retail Insight’s predictive modeling engine, this feature brings greater foresight to food recovery by identifying excess inventory unlikely to sell—down to the store-item-date level.

Once an item has passed through markdown but remains unsold, it becomes eligible for donation, binning, or alternative re-use (such as animal feed). With Intelligent Donation Enablement, store colleagues simply scan the item in the RI app to check eligibility based on retailer-defined rules. If the product qualifies, they can immediately print a donation label (e.g., “Charity”) to mark it for collection—simplifying the in-store process while supporting compliance.

Behind the scenes, the solution generates a structured data feed of eligible items, allowing retailers to connect seamlessly with third-party donation partners or integrate into existing platforms. And as donations or disposals are recorded in the app, the RI platform automatically syncs with the retailer’s inventory system—eliminating manual reconciliation across tools.

Looking ahead, this capability will evolve into predictive donations, where the system proactively recommends donation over markdown when it identifies that excess inventory is unlikely to sell. The result: fewer wasted products, simplified store processes, and stronger alignment with retailers’ sustainability and food recovery goals.

With greater visibility into both risk and opportunity, store teams can make faster, more informed decisions—reducing waste, improving operational efficiency, and strengthening their brand’s environmental impact in the communities they serve.

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Dynamic + Prompted Markdowns with Food Safety Warnings:  This innovative solution enhances in-store efficiency while ensuring compliance with food safety regulations. This technology automatically tracks expiration dates and provides timely alerts for inventory nearing expiration. Additionally, it warns store associates if an expiry date entered into the system falls outside the typical date range, preventing data entry errors and reducing the risk of selling mislabeled or potentially unsafe products. The solution intelligently optimizes markdown timings and pricing strategies while directing store associates to the exact locations where action is needed, minimizing the time spent searching for products. This comprehensive approach not only reduces waste and protects margins but also delivers crucial food safety protection by instantly identifying potentially unsafe products, supporting both regulatory compliance and consumer safety.

Retail Insight’s WasteInsight platform also optimizes markdown strategies with a dynamic markdown pricing solution, helping retailers minimize waste while maximizing sales and profitability. The Dynamic Markdowns solution uses near real-time data and AI-driven insights to adjust pricing based on demand, sell-through rates, and expiration timelines—ensuring reductions happen at the right time to boost sell-through while maintaining margin. While the Prompted Markdowns solution strategically alerts store associates to items with upcoming expiration dates, enabling them to clear stock efficiently. Together, these features enhance operational efficiency, reduce food waste, and support a more sustainable, profitable retail environment.

This powerful product expansion gives retail teams a comprehensive solution to manage all forms of expiring inventory, clear de-listed products efficiently, and ensure food safety compliance. By bridging the gap between long-term strategic planning and day-to-day in-store execution, grocers can simultaneously reduce operational costs, strengthen brand reputation, and meet regulatory requirements for waste reduction and food safety. The result is a strategy that delivers measurable business outcomes: fewer unsold perishables, higher sell-through rates, reduced disposal costs, enhanced food safety, optimized labor productivity, and improved positioning as a sustainability leader—all increasingly critical differentiators in today’s competitive grocery market.