Jan Philipp Gresens, managing director of Feinbäckerei Ruch GmbH

Briefly introduce your company

Feinbäckerei Ruch was founded in 1905, so we've been on the market for a very long time. Our 80 branches are located in northern Hesse and southern Lower Saxony between Kassel and Hildesheim. The branches are divided into 3 concepts:

The Classic Bakery Branches, the More Modern Mannamia Cafes and the Bakery Factory The Bakery is our flagship store, where we attach particular importance to regionality, exclusive baking creations and high-quality materials. We have a total of just under 600 employees, including around 450 in sales.

They also have delivery customers, such as several Aldi branches. What challenges do you face when it comes to delivering to supermarkets?

We currently supply 53 Aldi-Nord stores in our region with baked goods. Of course, we also want to keep return rates as low as possible here. The biggest challenge is that we are currently still receiving Aldi's sales figures as an Excel file and therefore have a very large amount of manual effort to place orders and overview returns. That took us a lot of time in the beginning. ‍

What was your goal when you came to foodforecast?

We are already working successfully with foodforecast in our own branches. It was therefore immediately clear to us that we would also automate and optimize the process for supplying Aldi stores together with foodforecast.

What has changed since the introduction of foodforecast in the delivery of Aldi stores?

There were a few challenges in the beginning. We were not always able to categorize the same products as in our own stores, as the range is much smaller and therefore a different prioritization of the products has to be made. We also had to store some new parameters and fine-tune them together with foodforecast due to product range changes or new products at Aldi. But at the end of the day, the results are good! Since the introduction of Foodforecast's artificial intelligence, our staff has had more time to concentrate on other, important tasks. Automation really makes work easier for us! Foodforecast ensures that Aldi's sales figures are automatically incorporated into the AI forecasts, and we then receive the order suggestion directly into our inventory management system.

What is the biggest added value of FoodForecast technology for you?

The biggest added value for us is process automation and the associated time savings for our staff. What we also particularly appreciate is the automatic email about the return rates that we receive every evening. There, we can see at a glance where there are outliers, both in terms of products and in stores.

Would you recommend FoodForecast to Other Bakeries to Plan the LEH Counters?

I would definitely recommend foodforecast and AI for planning the LEH counters. We are very satisfied with the service, as the team always strives to implement our wishes quickly.

How did your key figures improve? For example, by what percentage has returns dropped in Aldi stores?

Since we've only been using AI to deliver to Aldi stores for a few months, we can't say too much about that yet. We reduce returns at Aldi by around 5% on average, but as I said, the figures are not yet very meaningful. In any case, artificial intelligence saves us time and requires less manpower.

What is the feedback from employees regarding the software?

At first, there was some skepticism about the introduction of artificial intelligence. However, we were able to quickly show our employees that AI usually makes better decisions because it works with a large amount of data and therefore has more information than humans. Nevertheless, we also communicate that employees are still allowed to adjust the AI forecast. For example, if the staff knows that an event is taking place that the AI does not know, we still need to intervene. However, employees should have good reasons for making a manual change. We have also trained our team leaders on this.

Do you have any suggestions for improvement? What else would you like to see?

We are currently not getting the last sales date from Aldi. As a result, the AI does not know whether the item is sold out at eight o'clock in the morning or just before closing time. Unfortunately, this still leads to inaccuracies in the forecasts. As soon as we get the live data from Aldi, that shouldn't be a problem anymore.

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