Customerland

Optimizing Grocery: AI Solutions and Future Trends

• mike giambattista • Season 3 • Episode 11

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When Amanda Oren and I finally connected after a month of calendar wrangling, I knew the wait was worth it. As VP of Industry Strategy for Grocery North America at Relex, Amanda brings a unique perspective – she joined the company after being a customer herself, giving her both the retailer's and the technology provider's view of the rapidly evolving grocery landscape.

Our conversation quickly dived into how Relux's AI-powered demand forecasting is helping grocers reduce inventory costs by an impressive 20% while simultaneously improving product availability and reducing waste. The platform sits atop retailers' transactional systems, aggregating data to optimize everything from shelf space allocation to safety stock levels. For an industry with razor-thin margins, these efficiencies represent significant competitive advantages.

We tackled the thorny topic of supply chain transparency and the looming FSMA 204 regulation that takes effect in January 2026. Amanda painted a vivid picture of the practical challenges: tracking an individual orange from farm to shopping cart would require RFID tags on every piece of produce, a capability that simply doesn't exist today. Similarly, tracing which specific avocados went into store-made guacamole presents near-impossible complexities. The industry is actively working to help legislators understand these realities while still advancing meaningful traceability improvements.

The conversation shifted to AI applications in retail, where Amanda cut through the hype with practical examples. From data cleansing to personalization, AI is transforming how retailers understand customers and optimize operations. Looking ahead to 2026, she predicted three major trends: the expansion of retail media networks, wider adoption of electronic shelf labels, and continued evolution of self-checkout technology with advanced anti-theft measures.

Whether you're a grocery executive navigating technology decisions, a supplier trying to understand retailer priorities, or simply interested in how your shopping experience is being reimagined behind the scenes, this episode delivers illuminating insights into the future of food retail.

Amanda Oren:

One of my colleagues was joking with me and said at NRF, because just all the signage everywhere. He was like did you know that the letters AI are in retail. No way Are you kidding me, it was everywhere. So, yeah, there's no question that there's a huge amount of hype around AI right now and the benefits that it can bring to retail, and I think for me it all comes back to kind of where I started this, which is, how do you drive efficiencies?

Mike Giambattista:

Amanda Oren is VP of Industry Strategy Grocery North America at Rilex, and between our teams and our schedules, we've been trying to have this conversation for roughly a month and we've been throwing calendars back and forth wildly. We finally made it so, amanda, thank you Really appreciate this.

Amanda Oren:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited that we made this work.

Mike Giambattista:

There's a lot to talk about here. I know just before we hit the record button we had touched on a couple of things where there's a lot of overlap between your wheelhouse and what this audience really likes to pay attention to. So before we get into any of that, just for further context, would you tell us about your role at Relux and really for people who may not know what Relux is really all about, Absolutely.

Amanda Oren:

That sounds great. So I've been here almost a year now and I focus exclusively on grocery North America. Relux is a company that was founded in Helsinki, finland, about 20 years ago by several data science and supply chain engineers and they have a very, very big stronghold in grocery Europe and over the last seven years or so have been penetrating North American retail at large and specifically grocery. So I came in with a background 100% on the retail side of the house. I've never worked in technology in my life but came in to help educate internally and help kind of build trust and evangelize externally around what we do and why we can add so much value and I come to relax actually as an X customer. So that's part of how I know the platform.

Mike Giambattista:

Oh, okay, interesting. Are you able to say who you were working for as a customer?

Amanda Oren:

Sure, absolutely. I was working for a company called we, which is an online Asian grocer based in California.

Mike Giambattista:

Okay, and you had hired relax to come in and do their thing.

Amanda Oren:

Yes, exactly.

Mike Giambattista:

Wow, interesting. So going through your materials, I saw one statistic which just stood out because, frankly, I don't know if anybody's really bold enough to put this kind of thing in print, but I'm just going to put it out here now and that is customers achieve 20% reduction in inventory costs with Rolex solutions. And I know you wouldn't put it out there if it wasn't supportable, but that's a big number and it's a big number in writing, because that kind of means that's the expectation level, you know.

Amanda Oren:

Yeah, I think there. You know, it depends on exactly the scenario, obviously, but let me just tell you a little bit about the platform, what we do and why we feel like we can make bold statements like that. So we are. We provide kind of a unified retail planning solution that helps both retailers and now also consumer packaged goods companies optimize not only supply chain but also merchandising and store operations. So we are natively cloud-based platform, have been, since the beginning, leveraging lots of AI and machine learning, which I know are big buzzwords today, but we use them to be able to deliver more accurate demand forecasts.

Amanda Oren:

basically, and that's kind of sits at the center of the entire platform is that demand forecast. That helps you understand better how much space you should be putting on your shelves for each product, how much inventory you need on hand, what your safety stocks look like and ultimately especially when it comes to grocery, how to optimize both your sales by not having out of stocks, as well as your shrink by not having too much in stock.

Mike Giambattista:

Okay, thank you, because that was my next question.

Amanda Oren:

I mean spoken to a lot of very smart people over the past couple of months who operate and they kind of we optimize retail, but it means so much, there's so much kind of baked into that, so so it can mean a lot of different things, but I do think, you know, when I think about, especially on the grocery side, as I think about kind of a grocer's solution architecture, they have these transactional, more foundational solutions like a point of sale system, an ERP solution, financial ERP, warehouse management solution et cetera, that are more transactional and we kind of sit on top of a lot of those solutions to help them get to a more optimized state.

Mike Giambattista:

Interesting, which brings up all kinds of technology, kinds of questions, because that's a lot of stuff to sit on top of and kind of aggregate it really is. I mean, it's a giant amount of stuff actually. I mean, one of the most fun aspects of this job is I get to talk to people who are coming up with creative solutions right now to do those kinds of things in various sectors. But it's a big undertaking. I mean you've got to just to put it out there you've got to have integrations and ways of aggregating data that could come from dozens of different directions in dozens or more different formats, and your job is to make sense of all that.

Amanda Oren:

That's true. I would say that retailers are getting a lot savvier over the last five to ten years on that front. A lot of them have that layer that actually does all of that for you. So there's like one central place where all the data is aggregated into um and has like very clear APIs to all the existing solutions. So I think it used to be more complex, but that's obviously in the best case scenario.

Mike Giambattista:

Not everybody has that just yet, well, you actually do this for a living. I only get to talk to people who do this for a living, so you're going to have a real kind of real world view of it, real kind of real world view of it. But in my conversations, I would say 95% of them, one or both parties to these transactions are struggling with data integration, especially when it comes to, you know, optimizing whatever it happens to be.

Amanda Oren:

No, that's right, it's also. It's not only that, but it's also data cleanliness as well.

Amanda Oren:

I don't know if that's the right term but making sure that you have UPCs or attach the right items and that you're tracking things properly, which is, once again in grocery, extremely complex. If you think about the idea of having a can of Coke that you can sell as an each or as a six pack. Even just that concept and how to set that up in any sort of system and make sure that you can track them separately, even though they're the same item, is extremely complex.

Mike Giambattista:

Yeah, yeah. So so good on you and your engineers for even choosing that path, because it's a, because it's a lot to consider.

Amanda Oren:

Well, actually our founders were really, really, really laser focused on the idea that there was so much food waste in the world and they really felt like they were getting PhDs. And they were in this very education focused world where they were becoming professors, basically going down a path to become professors, and they realized that they really wanted to go into the real world and solve real world problems with the solutions that they had built, rather than sort of evangelizing them in the world of academia.

Mike Giambattista:

Interesting. That's a whole other topic, because I know a bunch of academics who would probably love to make that jump. You know it's not so easy.

Amanda Oren:

To your point.

Mike Giambattista:

It's not. It's not. I have, you know, lots of friends and colleagues and family, as a matter of fact, who are in academia and they're kind of looking, you know, out from the inside or inside and from the outside, kind of going I want to be there, but anyway, that is another conversation, because that's a hard dog. But anyway, that is another conversation, because that's a hard dog. You know, before we we hit the record button on this, this conversation, we touched on the idea of supply chain transparency and traceability, which are big topics right now. We publish on that quite a bit, especially recently, a bit especially recently, and it occurs to me that your role at RelX and what you do and how you see the world of grocery be really interesting just to get your thoughts on. You know how's that all maturing right now? Because, you know, transparency has been kind of an idea for a long time, but up until fairly recently we want to make that. It's not really been achievable, it's just been a great thing to pursue.

Amanda Oren:

Yeah, and I would say that this new regulation that is in the process of being put in place, which is called FISMA 204, around traceability for food is trying to move the needle and trying to create progress, and I think it is doing that. However, there are still a lot of grayness around what is actually possible. So, for example, is it possible to trace food from supplier all the way to you know, from the field it's produce, let's say, all the way from the farmer to the retailer, to the retail location? Or is the expectation to trace it all the way to the consumer and all the way to the point of sale? And those two are quite different and there's a huge level of complexity in tracing it all the way to the point of sale. And so there's sort of a little bit of a negotiation, I would say, going on around how to interpret some of the legislation that was put in place without that next level of detail really at the time. So that is a big topic of discussion right now in Washington actually.

Mike Giambattista:

Yeah, it's giant, and I think one of the places I do want to go carefully is um, you know the, the trade policy. Some of the what the new administration is proposing out there or forget, proposing there's doing um, you know, creates a lot of headwind for these kinds of initiatives and you know they can be capital intensive. They require a lot of planning on the part of anybody involved. You know the host company or any of their vendors, the host company or any of their vendors to these giant investments in time, energy and money and, as you said, there was kind of a lack of clarity to begin with, and now you've got complicated culture and regulatory hurdles that are starting to appear out of nowhere. How is the grocery world handling that at the moment? And, just to put a stake in the ground, it's February 10th 2025 right now, and so I'm putting that out there because it'd be great to revisit this in six months or a year and see what really happened. But how's grocery viewing all this right now?

Amanda Oren:

Yeah, so my understanding is that the FSMA 204 regulation is supposed to go into effect. I think it's January 1st 2026. So the clock is seriously ticking. So the way that what I've heard and seen around how grocery is handling this is to do their best to come together. Legislators better understand where the industry sits today and what it would take to get to where the FSMA 204 initial regulation was kind of going and, you know, come up with a realistic expectation for the next, you know, 10 and a half months. So I'll give you an example. If you were to need to trace an orange, let's say, from the grower, an exact, specific orange from the grower to the point of sale where you put it in your bag and take it home to eat it, there needs to be some sort of RFID or tag on every single piece of produce in a store to help understand which exact orange went into your grocery cart versus my grocery cart, right?

Amanda Oren:

That is something that doesn't exist today and isn't being done anywhere in the world. So that's one example of why I think a lot of grocers are fighting pretty hard right now through education to help legislators understand that you know, really the regulation needs to be in until the product gets to the store and then you can track it by lot code. But once you need to get down to the each level, there's a whole nother level of tracking and infrastructure required that doesn't exist today. And then the other example is just thinking through kind of producing food in a store. So let's say you get a case of avocados and you want to make guacamole with it. Are you tracking when you get your little container of guacamole to take home with you? Do you know exactly which avocados went into that guacamole and which tomatoes and which lime and which onion?

Mike Giambattista:

Yeah, right now, no, the answer is absolutely not. Well, I know I know people in in retail are struggling with the same issues. On hard goods, you know there are, yes, regulations that the EU has prompted and is about to start enforcing that are producing a lot of headache on this side of things. But also, I think one of the big things and I'd really love to get your perspective on this is like look, product transparency, supply chain transparency isn't just this regulatory hurdle. There's massive opportunities to do really good and smart things for business there as well.

Amanda Oren:

Absolutely. Yeah, we've actually been talking a lot about that internally. That's a great point and we've been talking about with solutions like Relax, for example. If we could track code dates to the lot level in a better way than we can today, then it could drastically help us improve our forecasting capabilities. So I'll give you an example. We have a solution called True Inventory that helps grocers and retailers understand exactly what they have on hand for every item in every store, and it tries to take into account human behavior as well. So, for example, when was the last time you went to buy milk and you just took the carton from the front right? Most people look at the date codes and take the one with the longest date code, which often is in the back.

Amanda Oren:

So the idea of last in, first out doesn't work for a lot of products sitting on a grocery shelf, especially around the perimeter right and the fresh product, and so how do you factor those behaviors in when you try to help grocers understand how many they actually have on their shelf that are and what the expiration dates of those are? It's a very, very complex problem that gets made much easier when you're tracking expiration dates at the lot level and which lots sit on what shelf at what time. And so, yeah, there's no question that if we can get to a deeper, like if some of these regulations go into effect and we get a deeper level of data related to, for example, lot codes, there's a lot of potential return on investment for some of these systems that are going to need to get implemented to be able to do some of this tracking. But right now it just feels like a big headache for sure.

Mike Giambattista:

Yeah, and everybody's kind of going I know it's a good thing, I know it's a good thing, I know it's a good thing, but almost like we're telling ourselves that just to get through it.

Amanda Oren:

People understand. I mean, what do you want to know? You know, with the avocados and your guacamole came from here versus there, especially if there was an issue with some product along the way, like, yes, it would be great. There's definitely benefits to the consumer, but it's it's more of a matter of how do we get there and at what pace do we get there?

Mike Giambattista:

And at what cost, you know, and at what cost exactly there's there's a lot of money that goes into these kinds of things. I'm thinking of, I'm thinking some of the research that's come out over the past year or two about, specifically, gen z and and their you know, uh, x and y. We're starting to look at uh and demand even uh, you know supply chain transparency and authenticity in the brand messaging and those kinds of things. With Gen Z, it appears to be like it's an imperative, Like they won't if they detect fakeness or you're trying to hide something from them, they're out, they're gone, they're not even going to, they're not even going to consider it. So, for companies that that are trying to engage Gen Z, these kinds of ideas of and it's more, it's more pertinent hard goods, I'm sure, but you know, to be able to demonstrate that you're at least giving a real effort to show that you know, you're looking at your supply chain, you're being, you know, as open and as honest as you can be with what you're doing. That goes a long, long way.

Amanda Oren:

Absolutely. It's actually highly relevant in the food space as well. I think these new generations care a lot about sustainability and they also care a lot about local product. They want simpler supply chains. They want to be eating avocados, at least in California, avocados, at least in California, that were grown in California. That is a big, big topic of discussion, especially in the grocery community, is how to appeal to this newer generation. How can we tout more sustainability efforts and how can we also help them understand that we are localized in some ways, shape or form?

Mike Giambattista:

We've done a bit of work in the alcohol and beverage industry and watching the demographic shifts kind of correlate to the products that people are consuming there Younger generations and what they're drinking. Older generations, what they all expect to be drinking right about now, and it, it, um, that correlates directly with what younger generations are also consuming.

Amanda Oren:

You know, and every other yeah well, there's a massive trend towards non-alcoholic alcoholic beverages. I went to a big food uh, the biggest food trade show, I think in the? U US, maybe in the world it occurs every March called Expo West and it's in Southern California and this past March so 2024, there was a massive trend towards non-alcoholic beverages and Guinness actually had a huge, huge booth that was all non-alcoholic which was never seen anything. I've been going to these trade shows for many years and never seen anything like that. It was interesting. My other favorite one was some of the hard seltzer brands going to non-alcoholic which just made everyone laugh.

Mike Giambattista:

I don't even understand that.

Amanda Oren:

If White Claw is non-alcoholic, isn't that just like-.

Mike Giambattista:

Then what is it? Go to water? Yeah, I don't know. It's the idea of alcohol. You know what?

Amanda Oren:

You'd be surprised. You'd be surprised. I think some of it has to do with people wanting to have a certain brand in their hand at a party or whatnot. So there's wanting to feel included in the trend and wanting to feel part of things, and it's not only about the taste and the product.

Mike Giambattista:

I feel like that's a great conversation. When you have an actual beer in your hand, you can talk about those kinds of things and really get into it, but you know some later date. There's one other thing I would love to talk about, but it has the potential of taking us, you know, extending this conversation for hours and hours, and that is AI and retail.

Mike Giambattista:

Like what are the practical applications versus what's the hype, Because if you were at NRF, like I was, that everything's AI and everything is massively hyped, massively hyped and everything is massively hyped, massively hyped, and you know, yeah, you really have to kind of clear away a lot of smoke to try and figure out what what the reality is right now.

Amanda Oren:

Yeah, it's really true. Uh, one of my colleagues was joking with me and said at nrf, uh, because just all the signage everywhere. He was like did you know that the letters ai are in retail?

Mike Giambattista:

No, way, are you kidding me?

Amanda Oren:

It was everywhere. So, yeah, there's no question that there's a huge amount of hype around AI right now and the benefits that it can bring to retail, and I think for me, it all comes back to kind of where I started this, which is, how do you drive efficiencies? And I listened one of the sessions I went to at NRF. They were talking a lot about how the idea of implementing software is so different to what it was 20 years ago, and a lot of that has to do with AI. So it's not only the solutions, but it's also the implementation strategy and how you go about implementing software. Implementation strategy and how you go about implementing software. It's also something I mentioned about having these data connectors that now sit in place. I mean, things have just gotten so much more efficient. You think about cleansing your data. There's a solution for that. There's an AI-powered solution for that. You know there didn't used to be all these kind of quick shortcuts that retailers could take to kind of creating that more optimized solution and end state.

Amanda Oren:

But I do think I honestly do think ultimately there's a lot of. It comes back to this idea of being able to a couple of things. Number one better understand your customer more. Better understand how to personalize I mean we talked a little bit about that earlier, but being able to use all of the massive amounts of data out there to understand what each customer actually wants and how to communicate that to them. And then also being able to understand what you actually need to have in your store from an assortment standpoint, and then quantity, and what should that price be? When should you be promoting? I mean, there's there's so many massive decisions that need to be made at every retailer that have come from extensive amounts of data, and there was a lot of inefficiency and you know inaccuracy going on when everything was being done in Excel, and so I think there's just there's and inaccuracy going on when everything was being done in Excel.

Mike Giambattista:

Completely yeah.

Amanda Oren:

And so I think there's a lot of upside potential for these grocers. It's all about prioritization, though. They always have to really think through what are the biggest problems they're trying to solve and how can AI help them solve those problems, rather than looking at the new shiny toy, because I think that's for me what NRF sort of felt like is there were a lot of new shiny toys everywhere, but it was what are the problems? I think it's always better to start with problem and then solution.

Mike Giambattista:

Right, right. Well, let me wrap with this question. Next year, this time after NRF, has the dust has settled on NRF, maybe you will have gone to grocery shop or one of the other. You know 10,000 events that we, we all attend. What do you think will be the buzz in a year?

Amanda Oren:

Yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of buzz around retail media networks. I personally think so. This year there was a lot of conversation about electronic shelf labels. I think that will continue to become a big part of the sort of landscape in retail and it's much bigger in Europe. I think it's going to be much, much bigger in the US in the next 12 months.

Amanda Oren:

And then the other big trend which we've been talking about as we go to grocery shop and NRF and whatnot. For three years now we've been talking about retail media networks, but once again, if you look at Europe and where they are, which is way further ahead than we are in the US, I think that's going to be the other massive trend that you start to see everywhere is how do we actually incorporate retail media networks into everything that we're doing? And then I guess the last piece is related to both of those two things, which is around personalization, and once again there's been so much hype about personalization, but are we actually starting to execute it on it and who's succeeding and how are they succeeding?

Mike Giambattista:

That's a conversation I want to be a part of in a year because, one, you're focused on it as well, but two, especially because of the scope of what customer land is about. It all boils down to personalization on some level. All boils down to personalization on some level. And I'm old enough asterisk on that point to have heard like we've nailed personalization and I've been hearing it for over a decade Like, look what we can do now.

Amanda Oren:

And we have not Come on. Yeah, I mean, we know as customers that that's not true, right yeah? Exactly I know that that's not true. We're getting there. There's been major steps forward, but we haven't nailed it. There's still a lot. I still get I definitely still get advertising for cat products, but I don't own a cat. I mean, that's one silly example, but I don't care about what cat food's on sale next week. I don't own a cat. Like why are you telling me that?

Mike Giambattista:

um, so, there's, there's a lot of a lot of advancements, uh, to be made. Still, I think, around personalization I do too. It's going to be fun to see it, and I think I honestly think that, um, for all the hype and all of the incremental improvements that I've seen over the years decade plus AI is going to drive leaps in personalization that nobody could really achieve before. So I think we're going to start seeing some of the fruits of that next year. I think it's going to become real.

Amanda Oren:

I think so of ties. All of the things we just talked about together in some way is like more self-checkout technology, especially in grocery, where there's been a lot of hesitancy, a lot of theft, a lot of shrink. I think we're going to make a lot of strides towards figuring that out because once again in Europe they're way ahead of us and they have a huge amount more self-checkout technology that has led to a decrease in labor and a better customer experience for shoppers.

Mike Giambattista:

Less shrinkage, I'm sure.

Amanda Oren:

Way less shrinkage.

Mike Giambattista:

Yeah, interesting little side note, and then I will let you go is in our little grocery store where we live.

Mike Giambattista:

There it's a chain, I think it's a chain. It's part of a much bigger chain, but they've had, over the past year and a half or so, they've had three different self-checkout systems in place. So I don't know whether this is a test store or what, but just the other day we went through it and it stopped our checkout process midway and we couldn't figure out why. So we called the person over who said well, let me just replay the past few minutes for you. So she hit a button on the screen and it played a video of what we were actually doing there and apparently what happened was, as my wife was checking something out, passing it through the scanner, or she had her phone in her hand and the system thought that was another item, so it stopped it to me to check it out, which I thought was really smart, you know, kind of embarrassing for a few minutes while they pat you down or whatever, but no, which they didn't, but really smart, and that was the smartest version of that I think I've seen. So far, so cool.

Amanda Oren:

That's cool. The next step to that, by the way, is facial recognition, so that you don't even have to put in your phone number or anything and they're just going to know who you are and they're going to know everything about you immediately by just seeing your face in that camera.

Mike Giambattista:

It's out there already. Okay, then I'll let you go after this. I worked on a project about two, maybe three years ago where Amazon was building out some of their biometric checkouts, and I can't remember it was a part of your hand, it wasn't your fingerprint, it was like a palm something, I guess, but it was basically a biometric reader. I think you just like wave your hand over I saw that.

Amanda Oren:

I remember seeing that was really cool. I haven't seen it in practice yet, though, and that wasn't like. That was probably two, two nrfs ago yeah, and I think what happened.

Mike Giambattista:

I don't know this for sure, but I think what happened is um it was.

Amanda Oren:

It was too creepy yeah, yeah, or or was it not accurate enough, or maybe it was a combination of the two.

Mike Giambattista:

I mean, from what I understood, it was highly accurate, um, but there was a. There were a large number of people who just got freaked out by it, like is there a chip in me? What does that mean now? How do you know that? That you know that kind of thing. So, anyways, the fascinating world we live in with that, amanda Oren, thank you so much for your time. Just once again, amanda is VP of Industry Strategy Grocery for North America for Realex, and I want to thank you for your time and at least for me, this was worth all the calendar wrangling.

Amanda Oren:

Thank you. I really enjoyed myself as well. Thank you so much for having me.

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