Seattle tech company sues Albertsons, alleging theft of company secrets

Seattle, Wash.-based software-as-a-service company Replenium, which sells auto-replenishment software, is suing Albertsons in federal court for theft of company secrets. 

Replenium alleges in the lawsuit that it entered into a contract with the Boise, Idaho-based grocer in October 2020 to deploy the Replenium platform, which enables customers to automatically replenish a full basket of groceries. 

Albertsons was expected to launch the platform at its stores in December 2020. Replenium said in the lawsuit that the grocer described the tech as “industry revolutionizing” and noted that “no other grocer is doing it yet.”

Deployment of the ecommerce platform, which would have enabled Albertsons to automate a substantial portion of its routine purchases for customers, stalled. 

Albertsons issued a press release a year later, in December 2021, announcing the nationwide rollout, but 2022 came and went and the technology was never put in place.

Albertsons allegedly deployed Replenium at some stores but then terminated the contract in October 2023. 

“Unbeknownst to Replenium, during these three years of confidential information sharing, Albertsons was misappropriating Replenium’s trade secrets by building its own competing, full grocery basket auto-replenishment solution with the intention to replace the Replenium Platform,” the tech company said in an email to Supermarket News. 

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The company now claims that the move by Albertsons cost Replenium “millions of dollars in contract revenue and tens of millions of dollars in development of the platform and inflicted a substantial loss to Replenium’s investors, many of whom are senior industry leaders, due to the company’s investment in a flagship customer that acted in bad faith by repeatedly squeezing and ultimately discarding Replenium in violation of the parties’ contracts.”

An Albertsons spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit.