Mr. Gresens from the Ruch bakery

1. briefly introduce your company once

Feinbäckerei Ruch was founded in 1905, so we have 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 stores, the more modern mannamia cafés, and the Backmanufaktur. The Backmanufaktur is our flagship store, where we place particular emphasis on regionality, exclusive baking creations and high-quality materials. We have a total of almost 600 employees, around 450 of whom work in sales.

2. you also have delivery customers such as several Aldi stores. What challenges do you face when delivering to supermarkets?

We currently supply 53 Aldi North stores in our region with baked goods. Here, of course, we also want to keep the return rates as low as possible. The biggest challenge is that we currently still receive the sales figures from Aldi as an Excel file and therefore have a very large, manual effort to make the orders and keep track of the returns. This cost us a lot of time in the beginning. 

3. what were your objectives when you approached foodforecast ?

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

4. what has changed in the supply of Aldi stores since the introduction of foodforecast ?

There were some challenges at the beginning. We were not always able to use the same product categorization as in our own stores, as the range is much smaller and therefore the products had to be prioritized differently. 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 now have more time to concentrate on other important tasks. Automation really makes our work easier! Foodforecast ensures that Aldi's sales figures are automatically included in the AI forecasts and we then receive the order proposal directly in our merchandise management system.

5. what is the greatest added value of foodforecast for you? 

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

6. would you recommend foodforecast to other bakeries for planning their food retail counters?

I would definitely recommend foodforecast and AI for planning food retail counters. We are very satisfied with the service because the team always tries to implement our wishes quickly.

7. how have your key figures improved? E.g. By what percentage has the return rate in Aldi stores dropped?

Since we have only been using AI to supply Aldi stores for a few months, we can't say too much about this yet. We are reducing returns at Aldi by around 5% on average, but as I said, the figures are not yet very meaningful. In any case, with artificial intelligence we save time and need less manpower. 

8. what is the feedback from employees regarding the software?

Initially, there was some skepticism about the introduction of artificial intelligence. However, we were quickly able to show our employees that AI usually makes better decisions because it works with a large amount of data and thus has more information than humans. Nevertheless, we also communicate that the 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 about, we still need to intervene. However, staff should have good reason to make a manual change. We have also trained our team leaders in this. 

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

Currently, we do not yet get the last sale time from Aldi. As a result, the AI does not know whether the item is sold out at eight in the morning or shortly before closing time. Unfortunately, this still leads to inaccuracies in the forecasts. As soon as we get the live data from Aldi, however, this should no longer be a problem.