AI’s latest task is helping supermarkets safely unload soon-to-expire food

“Every day across grocery stores, staff go around and very manually go through all the different products to check if anything is about to run out of date,” TGTG Chief Executive Officer Mette Lykke said in an interview with Bloomberg Green. Lykke described this as a time-consuming process that’s prone to errors: Short-dated products are often spotted too late, and discounts meant to encourage purchasing leave potential revenue on the table, she said.

TGTG’s software factors in customer behavior, seasonality and other considerations to estimate how likely a product is to sell in a store at any given time, then suggests a discount rate as the item approaches its expiration date. The tool also helps workers track expiry dates such that staff only need to manually check 1% to 7% of products, Lykke said. And it flags when food could be donated or sold at a steep discount through Too Good To Go’s eponymous app.

The company trialed its new tool with a supermarket chain in France, where large grocery stores have since 2016 been banned from throwing away unused food that could be donated. The grocer, which TGTG did not name, had been discounting its cheeses by 50% nationwide when they got within two days of their expiration date. Now the store varies discounts based on region and time of year. In Normandy, for…