East of England Co-op has moved closer to its goal of eliminating edible food waste by 2030 by working with Retail Insight, the leading provider of in-store execution software. Last year, Retail Insight’s AI-powered markdown solution helped the cooperative prevent 1.8million meals from entering landfill.
Established over 150 years ago, East of England Co-op is now the largest independent retailer operating in the region, with over 120 food stores. To ensure continued innovation across its estate, East of England Co-op worked with Retail Insight to deploy Retail Insight’s expiry date management feature. Prompted Markdowns is a part of Retail Insight’s WasteInsight solution and was deployed to all of East of England Co-op’s food stores in September 2024.
Prompted Markdowns automates the identification of products nearing expiry, alerting staff members to focus only on products where action is needed. Streamlining the markdown process and stock exit procedures, Prompted Markdowns eliminates the need for time-consuming manual checks, improving the in-store teams’ productivity – a key area East of England Co-op sought to address.
The implementation of Prompted Markdowns also aligned with the retailer’s goals to simplify their reduced to clear (RTC) processes, reduce operational costs, and reduce food waste.
Alongside the operational changes, Retail Insight worked with the retailer to develop an integration between its solution and the electronic shelf labels (ESLs) supplied by Pricer that East of England uses. The integration triggers the ESLs to flash so that colleagues can more easily locate the appropriate product on the shelf to mark down, further boosting labour productivity.
Now live in all of East of England Co-op’s ESL-equipped food stores, the solution prevented 1.8 million meals from entering landfill in 2024, equating to preventing approximately 4,880 Co2e from being emitted – enough energy to power 5,810 UK homes for a year. It also improved sell through rates (STR) by +13%, helping East of England Co-op sell 6.9million items that would have otherwise been wasted, including 1.9 million units of fruit and vegetables.
Sam Winter, Chief Retail Officer at East of England Co-op, added: “We want to use technology to improve the lives of our colleagues, our customers, our members and the community. Retail Insight’s WasteInsight solution is a great example of exactly how we can do that. We listened to feedback and have reduced manual effort and frustration for colleagues in-store, ensuring we can give great deals on RTC products to our customers, and importantly put the society on a trajectory to meet our target to reduce food waste to 0% by 2030.”
Kieran O’Brien, VP Customer Success EMEA at Retail Insight, commented: “The ESL integrations we’ve delivered for East of England Co-op have drastically reduced the amount of time store associates spend on RTC markdowns. And, because our platform leverages foundational retail data, major operational changes could be implemented without the need for significant CapEx or store disruption and scaled quickly to accelerate ROI.”
