(Credit: Pexels)Southeastern Grocers Inc. (SEG) has rolled out Date Check Pro Software in 425 stores, following an initial pilot program, to tackle food waste management. SEG is the parent company of Fresco y Más, Harveys Supermarket and Winn-Dixie grocery stores.
Date Check Pro, developed by parent company Pinpoint Software, is an expiration date management software that lets companies know when and where products are expiring in store. The product is used by over a thousand supermarket, retail, and convenience store locations around the world to eliminate losses from dated and expired products and provide better products and experiences for their shoppers.
SEG is the largest partnership Pinpoint has with a retailer, according to CEO Andrew Hoeft. Because many SEG associates are Spanish-speaking, Pinpoint is working to implement multilingual support for Date Check Pro that will be introduced this summer.
As I discussed in May, food waste continues to be a critical sustainability issue. Globally, we waste about 1.4 billion tons of food annually, and wasting food contributes to 11 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to this 2021 Guide. The United States discards more food than any other country in the world – nearly 40 million tons every year. That’s estimated to be 30 to 40 percent of the entire U.S. food supply. Food insecurity is also a major issue. Before the pandemic, 35 million people across America had food insecurity and that number is expected to rise to as much as 50 million in 2021.
“There are many tech companies that offer expiration date management services but no other established expiration date companies that offer great tech,” said Kevin Jomant, a strategy director at SEG. “For that reason, our goal of providing our customers with the freshest possible product while minimizing food going to landfills would be best delivered with Pinpoint.”
Asked about the state of food waste management in the U.S., Hoeft indicated: “I think we have a lot of work to do. We are a lot better off even in the last two or three years than we were two or three years ago…I think we’re at a point of awareness and initial action in the U.S. that food waste has become a topic from consumers and sustainability and preventing food waste is now top of mind.”
