Real-world Grocery Demand Forecasting

Jan 31, 2024 5m read Jack Solomon Every day, grocers are tasked with predicting the future: they have to predict how many items will sell in the future to order the correct amount of inventory today. Since grocery retailers sell fresh food, which expires within a few days of being on the shelf, grocers need to be hyper-accurate in predicting item-level demand for each day. If grocers over-predict, they have tons of unsold food that gets thrown out; today, if food waste was a country it would be the third largest emitter behind the US and China.