Retail Insight announces WasteInsight AI grocery retail platform expansion including food safety warnings

Retail Insight, an AI powered analytics platform for grocery retailers, has announced enhancements to its WasteInsight platform with several new capabilities: Stock Exit Management, Intelligent Donation Enablement, and Food Safety Warnings.

This builds upon the company’s existing expiration date management solutions, Prompted Markdowns and Dynamic Markdowns, with a focus on food waste reduction and inventory optimisation.

"Food waste has moved from a backroom operational headache to a boardroom level priority for UK grocers,” says Alex Considine Tong, Chief Product Officer at Retail Insight.

“With razor thin margins and heightened consumer scrutiny, retailers can no longer afford to treat waste as a mere line item expense. Our expanded WasteInsight platform turns this challenge into an opportunity. We’re equipping our customers with not just better visibility, but enhanced AI driven foresight to act before stock becomes a problem. That’s a game-changer for retailers and a big step toward reducing both waste and risk."

Stock Exit Management: this feature gives retailers a data driven approach to optimising discounts on products nearing the end of their lifecycle. WasteInsight's AI driven dynamic pricing engine continuously adjusts markdown strategies for seasonal items, de-listed items and overstocked SKUs, determining the optimal timing and discount level to preserve margins while effectively clearing inventory. The system incorporates factors like historical sales patterns and local demand trends to ensure smart, proactive inventory decisions.

Intelligent Donation Enablement: a capability designed to streamline and standardise store level donation workflows. Built to complement Retail Insight’s predictive modelling engine, this feature aims to bring greater foresight to food recovery by identifying excess inventory unlikely to sell - down to the store item date level.

Once an item has passed through markdown but remains unsold, it becomes eligible for donation, binning, or alternative re-use (such as animal feed). With Intelligent Donation Enablement, store colleagues scan the item in the RI app to check eligibility based on retailer defined rules. If the product qualifies, they can immediately print a donation label (e.g., “Charity”) to mark it for collection.

Behind the scenes, the solution generates a structured data feed of eligible items, allowing retailers to connect seamlessly with third-party donation partners or integrate into existing platforms. And as donations or disposals are recorded in the app, the platform automatically syncs with the retailer’s inventory system, eliminating manual reconciliation across tools.

This capability will evolve into predictive donations, where the system recommends donation over markdown when it identifies that excess inventory is unlikely to sell. The result: fewer wasted products, simplified store processes, and stronger alignment with retailers’ sustainability and food recovery goals.

Dynamic and Prompted Markdowns with Food Safety Warnings: this technology automatically tracks expiration dates and provides timely alerts for inventory nearing expiration. Additionally, it warns store associates if an expiry date entered into the system falls outside the typical date range, preventing data entry errors and reducing the risk of selling mislabeled or potentially unsafe products.

The solution optimises markdown timings and pricing strategies while directing store associates to the exact locations where action is needed, minimising the time spent searching for products. This approach not only reduces waste and protects margins but also delivers crucial food safety protection by instantly identifying potentially unsafe products, supporting both regulatory compliance and consumer safety.

RTIH AI in Retail Awards

RTIH, organiser of the industry leading RTIH Innovation Awards, proudly brings you the first edition of the RTIH AI in Retail Awards, which is now open for entries. 

As we witness a digital transformation revolution across all channels, AI tools are reshaping the omnichannel game, from personalising customer experiences to optimising inventory, uncovering insights into consumer behaviour, and enhancing the human element of retailers' businesses.

With 2025 set to be the year when AI and especially gen AI shake off the ‘heavily hyped’ tag and become embedded in retail business processes, our newly launched awards celebrate global technology innovation in a fast moving omnichannel world and the resulting benefits for retailers, shoppers and employees.

Our 2025 winners will be those companies who not only recognise the potential of AI, but also make it usable in everyday work - resulting in more efficiency and innovation in all areas.

Winners will be announced at an evening event at The Barbican in Central London on Wednesday, 3rd September.