October 27, 2022 – Over the past year Ahold Delhaize led three sprint weeks to complete the Food Waste Reduction Challenge as part of Kickstart AI. Kickstart AI aims to build practical Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions that solve real business problems by leveraging the joint AI talent of leading Dutch companies including Ahold Delhaize, ING, KLM, and NS.
Ahold Delhaize chose to tackle food waste as the first Kickstart AI challenge due to scale of this global problem. The cross-company AI team – which included talent from Ahold Delhaize, ING, KLM, and NS – worked with one of our great local brands, Delhaize Belgium. In three sprint weeks, the team worked on improving a complicated demand forecasting model that predicts Delhaize Belgium’s customer demand and helps balance product availability and waste.
To predict customer demand as accurately as possible, the Kickstart AI team took a variety of factors and data into account. Such as product discounts, the time of day or week, and even the weather. The algorithm then looked at the relationship between all these inputs and resulting customer demand. As the algorithm processes more data, from a larger number of inputs, it can more accurately understand the impact of future conditions on customer demand.
The results...
As of now, after several months of testing at Delhaize Belgium’s operation, the Kickstart AI team is extremely pleased to see the improvement of their demand forecasting. In fact, the model has become 26% more accurate and this will help reduce Delhaize Belgium’s food waste by 21%.
Overall, this challenge was an important learning experience for Kickstart AI as it demonstrated that as a team, joint expertise, collaboration and talent can transform everyday life. The team also noted three key achievements:
- Kickstart AI brought together and helped develop AI talent from leading Dutch companies to tackle a Global challenge.
- By improving Delhaize Belgium’s demand forecasting model, Kickstart AI now has an opportunity to reduce food waste further, potentially across all of Ahold Delhaize’s brands.
- Most importantly, the Kickstart AI team learned that by bringing together a range of backgrounds and experience, they can solve complex problems which benefit the communities all of our brands serve.
Check out the video below to learn more!
