A grocery store contains fruit, vegetables, meat, bread, and other items that can expire. In order to keep these items in stock, the store must be aware of how much food has been sold and what has gone bad. When a food item is low in stock, the store needs to order more of that food from a central distribution system.

Managing food inventory is not simple. Some kinds of meat might expire faster than others. Avocados do not become ripe at the same rate as apples. In order to keep the shelves stocked, there are manual workflows for checking the inventory and ordering new inventory.

Afresh is a company that builds software for grocery stores. 

Afresh works with grocery chains that have a central distribution center. These grocery stores already have some software. At the back of the store, inventory management systems maintain records of the items that the store has on the shelves. At the front of the store, checkout systems detect what has been sold and help to update inventory. When the inventory is running low, the store can order more inventory from the central distribution center, so that trucks can deliver more inventory.

Afresh improves the operational intelligence of these stores by detecting spoilage among items that are prone to expiration, such as fruit. Volodomyr Kuleshov is the CTO and co-founder of Afresh and he joins the show to discuss the technical challenges of a grocery store, and the software that Afresh is building to make groceries more intelligent.

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