Auchan Luxembourg has saved over a million products using AI

To mark its 30th anniversary, Auchan Luxembourg has reported on the results of using artificial intelligence technologies to tackle food waste. Since 2023, the retailer has been using software solutions from the start-up Smartway in four of its stores. Over the past three years, the implementation of these systems has prevented 1,245,864 products nearing their use-by date from being disposed of. As a result, the company has been able to prevent the emission of 1,495 tonnes of carbon dioxide and deliver total savings of €1,828,874 to its customers.

Luxembourg has become the third country in which the Auchan Group operates, following Romania and France, where two specialised analytical modules have been rolled out. The Smartdetection algorithm automatically identifies products whose use-by dates are approaching and alerts shop staff in real time, minimising the risk of problematic items being overlooked on the shelves. At the same time, the Smartdecision module calculates the optimal discount level for each individual product to maximise the likelihood of it being sold whilst maintaining profitability. Three years after the system was launched, the food waste prevention rate had increased by 38 per cent. In addition, the rate at which discounted goods were sold increased by 14 per cent, whilst the recovery rate for products that would previously have been written off entirely rose by 62 per cent.

The introduction of artificial intelligence has also significantly reduced the operational workload on staff. Thanks to the partial phasing out of manual shelf checks, it now takes less than forty minutes to check all use-by dates in a single hypermarket every day. Fabrice Le Bon, manager of the Auchan Opkorn store, emphasises that the benefits of automation were evident from the very first weeks, providing the company with long-term environmental and economic advantages.

Nevertheless, Smartway’s management acknowledges that the retailer did not wait for modern technologies to emerge to tackle the problem of waste. As noted by the co-founders of the AI start-up, Christophe Menez and Paul-Adrien Menez, Auchan has been working with the charity Stëmm vun der Strooss since 2009, redistributing around 125 tonnes of unsold food each year. New digital tools have simply scaled up this well-established, pragmatic approach, enabling the organisation to capitalise on the benefits of accurate data.