Marqt and Albert Heijn are the first chains in the Netherlands to work with the startup Wasteless. The promise: supermarkets sell more and waste less with Wasteless by making use of optimized price reductions via the cash register system. Wasteless has developed a self-learning algorithm that continuously determines the best price in relation to the best-before date. Shoppers see on the electronic shelf label on the shelf and at the checkout a price linked to the specific expiration date: a short expiration date makes a product cheaper, a longer expiration means a higher price. The supermarket therefore throws away less fresh products.

Based on its experience in Italy with the Iper chain, Wasteless reduced the waste in the poultry category by 89% and increased the bottom line by 25%. Shoppers adjusted their buying behaviour from the first day and understood that they can benefit by buying products with a shorter shelf life if they eat them within a few days. Wasteless is simple for the customer, very useful for the producer and increases the margin for the retailer.

Tesco is readying another cull of the brands on its shelves. Chief executive Dave Lewis plans to shed 20% of its 40,000 products as it tries to fight back against discounters Aldi and Lidl. The first of these cuts began in 2015, just a year after Lewis’ arrival at the retailer. Since then, he has more than halved the number of individual products - at one point standing at 90,000 - stocked by Tesco across its stores. Lewis also plans to cut costs by placing bigger orders with fewer suppliers, as well as rebranding and prioritising Tesco’s own-label ranges.

“Collaboration is the new competition”....; a quote that becomes truly visible in the food retail industry with many examples of strategic partnerships. A recent example is the partnership between Chinese grocery retail group China Resources Vanguard adding 2,000 of its outlets to Alibaba-owned delivery platform Ele.me in 100 cities across the country. The partnership includes a range of store formats, including hyper-stores, standard supermarkets, premium supermarkets and convenience stores. As Alibaba and its subsidiaries continue to look for partnerships with brick- and-mortar retailers to drive it’s New Retail omnichannel and ecosystem agenda, CR Vanguard has been encouraged by the measurable success of the Suguo partnership, with the chain growing online sales by more than 60% over the past three months, and sales rising 80-fold in China’s tier 3 and tier 4 cities.