Shelf Engine’s CEO On Disruptive Innovation Without Disruptive Adoption and the AI-Driven Future of Grocery Retail

Stefan Kalb, CEO of Shelf Engine, discusses his company's mission to eliminate food waste and revolutionize the grocery business through AI-driven technology. Founded in 2016, Shelf Engine has diverted over 4.5 million pounds of food waste from landfills and helped clients achieve an average gross margin dollar expansion of more than 15%. The company's unique Results-as-a-Service (RaaS) model directly takes on inventory risk and guarantees outcomes for its customers, including major retailers like Kroger, Target, and Whole Foods. Kalb highlights the persistent problem of product availability, quality, and consistency in grocers due to supply chain disruptions and emphasizes Shelf Engine's ability to address these issues through AI-driven order automation. The company also tackles shrink discrepancies, which occur more than 75% of the time for large and small grocers, by providing accurate waste data that helps retailers understand their true shrink problems. In response to COVID-19's impact on businesses, Shelf Engine assists customers in adapting by relieving pressure on labor through AI-driven ordering systems. The company's success is attributed to its highly capable AI team and the unique advantage of capturing data from stores and vendors that helps inform accurate predictions for each store's performance. Lastly, Shelf Engine uses Arize AI for model monitoring and ML observability, which provides valuable insights into error metrics, lineage, versioning, and proactive detection of model drift. The company plans to scale its technology further in the coming year to work with more retailers and help them capture growth opportunities.