Too Good To Go AI App Can Help Retailers Sell Near-Expired Goods

Date: January 23, 2024

Too Good To Go, an artificial intelligence app, offers consumers ‘surprise bags’ of unsold goods about to expire at highly discounted prices.

Consumer goods come with a strict expiry date, some long-due and some short-termed. Supermarkets are the biggest outlets for consumer goods sales and the largest hubs of expired goods waste. The expired goods are often taken off the shelf and not sold anywhere or reused. So, companies often apply sales-boosting strategies for expiry-nearing products, but identifying the products and tracking the overall campaign can get quite difficult when done manually.

This manual, tiring, and long-tailed process prevents supermarkets from tapping potential revenues and converts their investments into expired wastage. vToo Good To Go, an AI-powered app, has devised a potential solution to this problem by utilizing AI to identify and track expiry-nearing products. 

The app is built by an 8-year-old Danish company that cuts its profits by addressing the key challenges of short-dated products and discounting them by hand. The pitch from the company is that with the AI app TGTG, teams can efficiently identify short-dated products and bring them forward for faster sales. It also recommends sales-boosting strategies for products nearing their expiry dates and prioritizes them based on the cost of the product, consumer demand, and various other factors. The app will be rolled out globally soon, beginning with an initial rollout in the international supermarket chain SPAR.

“Every day across grocery stores, staff go around and very manually go through all the different products to check if anything is about to run out of date,” said the CEO of TGTG. Short-dated products are often spotted too late, even if they are one of the most demanded ones. Dairy products, organic items, and others having 2-3 days of shelf life require stricter monitoring to prevent unwarranted losses.

Efficiently combining the product buying behavior with their expiry dates can help supermarkets and general retail stores tap a new revenue stream, which was once considered an inevitable loss. It also automates and digitizes multiple inventory management processes and boosts marketing efforts to increase sales before expiry dates.

TGTG also recommends the ideal discounts for expiry-nearing products by closely monitoring consumer buying behavior and tracking the peak times of purchase. Discounts also incur higher footfall, which multiplies the chances of selling other products and the expiry-ridden ones. Implementing this new AI-powered solution will take time to show objective data on commercial real-world grounds. But the solution shows confident promise in its efficiency and intelligence.