Austin, Texas-based Oracle recently added fresh management to its Oracle Retail Merchandising Cloud Services.

“Grocers continue to expand their offerings to compete for shoppers’ hearts and minds with convenience and choice,” said Mike Webster, senior vice president and general manager of Oracle Retail. “Enabling customers to grab a sandwich, sushi, or even a pre-made dinner gives them incentive to come into a store and spend more – but it comes with complexity for the grocer. Today, we are eliminating that hassle by enabling food retailers to better trace all fresh foods and bring together recipe management and ingredient management. This will help grocers handle production planning and execution more precisely, as well as account for the cost of labor and packaging, all within their familiar Oracle platform for modern retail.”

In fresh departments, inventory management is a key part of food safety as it is important to have a reliable system for keeping track of freshness. Part of Oracle’s fresh management APIs and extensions are sensors that can monitor products that are close to expiration.

“With the Fresh Items Ingredients Management API and Zero Waste cloud service extension available for Oracle Retail Merchandising Cloud Service, grocers can manage the sourcing and procurement of the ingredients from within the store to factor in the material cost of those ingredients, inventory implications, and restocking all from easy-to-use mobile applications,” the company said. “For example, strawberries and blueberries from the produce section nearing the end of life, granola, and yogurt could all be flagged as items leaving a store shelf to be used in the deli section to make a parfait. Merchandising can account for the average cost of the produced items based on the current prices of the ingredient items and make all the appropriate stock ledger entries.”

This article is an excerpt from the August 2023 issue of Supermarket Perimeter. You can read the full Food Safety feature and more in the digital edition here.