What nobody tells you when your startup begins to scale is that you’ll soon find yourself spending more mindshare on the team than on the tech. After all, that team you’re building will ultimately iterate and optimize the core technology that got you off the ground. Nobody gets to the next level working alone. Yet it’s your role — and my role — in senior leadership that significantly influences what that team experience is. How it feels to engage in the work is a predictor of whether or not people want to stay engaged in that work. No pressure, right? In the messy middle of the Great Resignati ..read more

Searching for differentiation as competition in grocery steepens, some retailers are reevaluating the risks and benefits of experimenting with innovation. Heinen’s Chief Innovation Officer, Chris Foltz, discovered a way to differentiate from the competition completely: wellness centers in the grocery store.  Foltz appeared on Shelf Engine’s Fresh Thinking podcast to share how Heinen’s is innovating to enhance the entire customer experience around food and to offer advice to others in grocery retail hoping to do the same. 1. Innovate with your customer in mind Heinen’s has long been known ..read more

Support for green grocery innovation has been gaining momentum across the industry. The Fresh Thinking podcast explored one retailer’s progress in an episode featuring Mark Koppang, Director of Sustainability of Raley’s, a regional grocery chain with 126 locations serving California and Nevada. Responsible for making Raley’s a leader in supermarket sustainability, Koppang’s role sits at the intersection of customer experience, retailer strategy, vendor interests, and compliance. In this episode, Koppang shares what makes the Raley’s sustainability program so inventive and describes his leaders ..read more

Grocery retailers face a myriad of challenges with ordering—and for good reason. Demand forecasting for retail is tough to get right. Order too much inventory and an influx of food waste erodes profits and hurts the environment. Order too little and stockouts frustrate shoppers and lead to missed sales. Grocery buyers must also anticipate how purchasing patterns might be impacted by weather, holidays, special events, promotions—the list goes on—while navigating labor constraints and supply chain disruptions that affect what is available to order in the first place. Why retail ordering still fa ..read more

Grocery store workers stood at the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, putting these employees at significantly higher risk for contracting and spreading the virus. By June of this year, there had been at least 185 grocery worker deaths and at least 42,000 grocery workers infected or exposed, according to data from The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW). To protect these essential workers, stores across the country implemented one-way aisles, strict social-distancing requirements, and increased customer access to contactless shopping. The average wages of supermark ..read more

For many people, a good portion of 2020 and 2021 felt somewhat wasted. Rather than seeing friends, going into the office, sending kids to school, or traveling, we were largely confined to our homes. While some of that time was spent taking inventory of things like health and family, everyone, it seemed, was taking inventory of food. Before the pandemic, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that approximately one pound of food per person was wasted each day in the United States. That’s 81.4 billion pounds of food waste generated in America annually, or between 30-40 percent of the food ..read more

What’s something that each of us has in common? We all have connections to food. As one of the key elements of culture (I grew up in France and could go on and on here—maybe some other time), food plays a starring role in our lives. Yet we all know that food is not abundant for everyone. What you may not know is how much food is actually wasted right where you buy it—at the supermarket. That’s why we’re so honored to announce that Ellen DeGeneres, Portia de Rossi, Shaun White, and Shawn Mendes have all linked arms with us at Shelf Engine to help fight grocery food waste. Their voices help ampl ..read more

It goes without saying: reducing your carbon footprint is an important and valuable goal. Whether that comes from switching to an electric car to ditching plastic straws, every little switch helps when it comes to lowering carbon in the atmosphere of a rapidly warming Earth. When evaluating which individual choices will have the most impact, one of the most important things you can do is carefully consider what you eat. Certain foods have very high carbon dioxide emissions, while others rank reliably low. Some of the most common offenders on the emissions scale are meat and dairy products. Nut ..read more

We feel so honored to share the news that Shelf Engine has been named one of the Top Workplaces for Women by Elpha! We believe this distinction speaks to the company we’re building, our workplace culture, and our efforts to champion diversity, equity, and inclusion — and we’re just getting started! It may come as no surprise that women are woefully underrepresented in tech. What’s especially striking is just how systemic the gender gap really is. Across nine dimensions of tech work, CIO.com reported data describing gender gaps across the entire professional landscape, from degree attainment an ..read more

Each year, between 30-40% of food in the United States is wasted. This big number corresponds to a big problem—with a startling impact. Wasted food can end up in landfills, where it produces methane, a greenhouse gas. The resources that went into growing that wasted food are likewise wasted, including water, labor, processing, packaging, transportation, and storage. Food waste is also a moral concern, particularly in a country where as many as 42 million people experience food insecurity. Roughly 31% of wasted food comes from consumers and retailers. Consumers typically waste food simply by bu ..read more