Grocery Spoilage Tracking 101: 7 Tips & Tools

Food waste is a massive problem in the U.S., and some experts estimate that almost 30% of the food on grocery store shelves is never sold. But getting a handle on your grocery spoilage tracking is easier said than done.

A lack of visibility and manual processes makes it challenging to get to the core of why you’re left with spoiled stock in the first place.

Here are seven practical tips you can implement in your grocery store today to cut down on food waste, meet customer demand, and improve your bottom line.

Common Causes of Grocery Spoilage

First things first: What makes grocery spoilage tracking so difficult? Here are a few of the primary culprits:

• Manual processes: When your spoilage tracking process relies mostly on memory and walking the aisles, it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks. Add that to the manual writing of purchase orders, and managing food waste becomes extra challenging.
• Lack of visibility: It’s hard to optimize your grocery spoilage tracking when you can’t see the status of every item. Without a holistic view of your produce, dairy, and meat sections, you end up being reactive instead of proactive about tackling spoilage.
• Aesthetics: Sometimes, overstocking isn’t caused by reacting to a surge in demand, but by trying to fill empty shelf spaces. When improperly sized and planned displays are constantly being refilled, it can quickly lead to food waste.
• Improper environmental control: Produce sections have to be kept cool, and some vegetables need moisture to stay fresh. Unfilled misters, improper temperatures, and other environmental factors can lead to waste.

These aren’t the only causes of spoilage. Disruptions in the grocery store supply chain, whether from delayed shipments or swings in weather, are also major contributors to food spoilage.

7 Tips & Tools To Improve Grocery Spoilage Tracking

While a certain amount of food waste is inevitable, you shouldn’t just shrug it off. Spoiled food is a total loss, lowering your revenue in an industry that already has notoriously small profit margins. 

If you find that you’re frequently throwing out food, the time to tackle food waste at your grocery store is now.

Here are seven practical and cost-effective tips and tools to improve your grocery spoilage tracking.

1. Implement the FIFO Method

Our first piece of advice may be the most basic, but it’s also the most fundamental in tackling spoilage in your grocery store. 

Enter: the first in, first out (FIFO) method. This is when the items you acquire first are also the first you put on the shelves to be sold. 

For example, if you get fresh milk shipped in on Mondays and Thursdays every week, you would put out and sell all of the milk you received on Monday before moving any of the Thursday arrivals from the storeroom.

Additionally, you’d want to put Monday’s arrivals toward the front of the shelf so customers pick them up first.

The FIFO method is not only best practice for selling produce and other perishable items, but it encourages you to actively monitor the status of items on the shelf and in your storeroom. If you find that you can’t consistently sell your earlier arrivals before they go bad, you might need to adjust how many you’re ordering or the timing between reorders. 

Related Read: How To Manage Perishable Inventory: Expert Tips

2. Leverage Inventory Management Software

Many independent grocery stores still rely on manual processes to track inventory. Unfortunately, this is time-consuming, error-prone, and can lead to an uptick in both unhappy customers and wasted food. 

In addition to creating more food waste, manual grocery store inventory management tends to:

• Waste money on excess stock and increased carrying costs.
• Lose profits on overordering perishable items.
• Frustrate customers with frequent stockouts.
• Lead to decision-making that’s based on a hunch, not fact.

The solution? Start using the inventory management tools built into modern point of sale (POS) systems to streamline your inventory processes, improve visibility over your perishable stock, and make more informed decisions.

Enter the expiry dates of items in your inventory management system to get automatic alerts when those items are about to expire, so you can quickly set up discounts. This information helps you prioritize areas of the store for regular stock counts.

Integrated inventory management also gives you a real-time view of your stock, automatically updating inventory levels every time an item is scanned at checkout — this means you always have an accurate view of your remaining perishable inventory.

3. Rightsize Your Fresh Food Displays

Everyone loves a bright and beautiful produce aisle. It’s a great way to create a welcoming feeling of freshness the minute a customer enters the store. But while a great-looking produce section is important, it shouldn’t come at the expense of your bottom line. 

Small grocery stores, in particular, sometimes have the habit of getting produce bins that are bigger than they need. Use the sales reports on your POS system to understand your customer preferences and base the size of displays on actual customer demand.

You can also look at common grocery store metrics (like inventory turnover) to understand the full life cycle of different items. Generally speaking, use smaller display sizes for items that expire quickly (e.g. meat, fresh berries) and reserve your bigger displays for items that last longer (e.g. onions, potatoes).

If you have an overly large produce case, don’t sweat it. Instead of investing in an all-new display, buy case or shelf dividers to break them into several smaller areas.

Remember: Smaller displays mean that shelves may empty faster, so regularly check your smaller bins to rotate in fresh items from the storeroom.

4. Set Automated Reorder Points

One of the hardest aspects of perishable and fresh produce inventory management is optimizing reorder times. When ordering is done manually, managers are often stuck in a reactive mode: reordering because stock is overstocked and going bad, or is already sold out.

Instead, use the perishable inventory tracking together with automatic low-stock alerts to optimize your reordering process. Your POS system allows you to set reorder points for certain items based on:

• Expiry date (average)
• Supplier lead time
• Historical sales data

Then, the second that item’s stock level reaches a certain threshold, you’ll be notified so you can generate a purchase order. Put simply, automated reordering tools let you reorder proactively and based on real customer demand.

The more your customers buy, the more precise your data will be, allowing you to dial in precise reorder points — this way, you can optimize your inventory levels and reduce waste. 

5. Use Data for Better Demand Forecasting

One of the biggest roadblocks in grocery store spoilage tracking is sudden surges (or dips) in demand. Grocery store inventory is seasonal, constantly changing with the weather, holidays, community events, and other factors.

Without a solid grocery demand forecasting strategy, you may lack key insights into your customers’ preferences and behavior that can help you reduce food waste. 

Use the reporting and analytics features on your POS to uncover consistent trends, so you know when to order extras of certain items (and when not to). 

6. Use Barcodes To Reduce Misscans

Your data is only useful to you if it’s accurate — and improperly ringing up items can be a major headache for produce departments in particular.

For example, if customers routinely mis-scan Fuji apples as Gala at self-checkout, you might find yourself overordering Gala apples and understocking Fujis.  Even well-trained staff can make these easy mistakes, especially after big seasonal changes or during busy times.

To reduce these kinds of errors, use food-safe labels on produce so customers can scan items at checkout instead of looking them up manually. This not only improves inventory accuracy, but helps speed up checkout — a win-win for your employees and your customers.

Many grocery store POS systems support embedded barcodes, meaning you can accurately price items by weight at checkout, too. 

7. Check Your Temperature, Misting Machines, and Other Equipment

Not all produce is created equal. Potatoes, onions, and root vegetables can survive at room temperature for weeks (even months) with minimal intervention. On the other hand, delicate fruits like blueberries or quick-growing plants like green onions spoil relatively quickly. 

This means you need to create ideal areas for different types of produce. The entire produce section should be kept dry and cool and out of direct sunlight. For produce that needs misting, ensure your misters are timed to go off every 20 minutes or so, and don’t spray excess water.

Remember: The goal of a misting system is to get the surface of a fruit or vegetable wet, not submerge it. Check your shelves occasionally to make sure they’re fully draining water. Any standing water left over after misting is a surefire path to premature spoilage.

Last, it’s important to know which types of produce need misting and which don’t. Watering vegetables that don’t need it or overwatering those that do guarantees more spoilage.

Improve Grocery Spoilage Tracking and Visibility With a Trusted Technology Partner

Optimizing stock levels and reducing food waste is better for the environment, better for customers, and better for your bottom line. But without the right technology, it’s hard to get an unbiased view of inventory and create consistent processes.

But not all technology will work for your business — you need a technology partner that understands the daily challenges of running a grocery store.

IT Retail is built on over 30 years of giving grocery stores, supermarkets, and food markets of all sizes the industry-specific tools they need to thrive. With seamless perishable inventory management tools, low-stock alerts, and streamlined reordering and receiving, IT Retail makes it easy to cut costs and food waste in one fell swoop.

Talk with one of our experts today to see how IT Retail can help you improve operations at your grocery store.