Earth Fare Sees Success with A.I.-Optimized Promos

Earth Fare has seen significant improvements with top-line sales in the past year after deploying artificial-intelligence technology to optimize promotions by helping it decide which items to promote and how often.

The Asheville, N.C.-based natural and organic grocer’s successful utilization of Toronto-based Daisy Intelligence Corp.’s A.I. software has enabled the 41-store regional retailer’s merchandising team to unlock powerful insights from historical sales data to increases the effectiveness of weekly ads and promotions.

Now seeking to grow store units by more than 25 percent annually, Earth Fare’s successful AI experiment is detailed in a case study, “A.I. Powered Promotion Optimization- Brick & Mortar’s Answer to Leveraging Data,” undertaken by the Center for Advancing Retail & Technology (CART).

“Without doubt, Daisy has driven a ‘meaningful lift’ in basket size and trips without any additional margin cost,” according to Scott Little, CFO at Earth Fare, which is now seeing a solid and substantial trend in year-on-year improvement in sales and transactions as Daisy’s utilization 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,” Little notes.

“We’re all aware of the talk around A.I., and with regards to this particular case study in the grocery category, what impressed us most was the overwhelmingly positive results, with limited required changes to the end-user’s business,” says Sterling Hawkins, co-founder of CART. “The ROI tells us that Daisy Intelligence and A.I. companies like them provide solutions to address the issues that many retailers are struggling with in this highly competitive marketplace.”

Gary Saarenvirta, CEO of Daisy Intelligence, says retailers have long sought to increase the effectiveness of weekly ads or promotions with limited success.

“Now that we can deploy artificial intelligence (A.I.) to power the gathering of deep insights and recommendations, forward thinking retailers like Earth Fare and others are making headway towards utilizing more math to understand what products to promote, as well as optimize pricing and demand forecasting,” Saarenvirta notes.

The complete case study can be found here. http://www.advancingretail.org/resources/AI-Powered-Promotion-Optimization