At the 41-store Earth Fare chain, the food is organic and natural but the intelligence is artificial — at least when it comes to promotion planning. For the past year, the retailer has used an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based solution to help its category managers determine which items to feature in weekly promotions. In addition to saving man-hours in the marketing and merchandising departments, the solution has helped Earth Fare improve basket size and customer trip metrics.
Previously, Earth Fare merchandisers and marketers had to earmark numerous hours each week to manually determine which products to promote. Grocery deflation presented an additional challenge in driving appropriate sales and achieving gross margin balance.
Working with a SaaS solution from Daisy Intelligence Corp., the retailers can leverage powerful insights locked within Earth Fare’s historical data, analyzing large quantities of transactional and operational data to produce automated operational decision recommendations. After some trial and practice, the Earth Fare team began using the AI-based solution to drive promotion planning eight weeks out. Human judgment still plays a role in fine-tuning specific promotions as they get closer, based on dynamic factors such as supply chain issues and pricing of perishables.
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“Without doubt Daisy has driven a meaningful lift in basket size and trips without any additional margin cost,” said Scott Little, CFO of Earth Fare in a statement. The retailer is seeing a solid and substantial year-on-year improvement trend in sales and transactions as utilization of the Daisy solution has increased over time.
“Most of our team is finding they are spending less time trying to find the right data and understand it, and more time addressing the more critical elements of their jobs,” said Little.
