Stater Bros. extends AI fresh buying from the shelf into its warehouses
San Bernardino's Stater Bros. said earlier this year it will expand its partnership with Afresh, the San Francisco fresh-inventory software firm, on two fronts. It will extend Afresh's AI replenishment tool beyond produce into additional fresh departments, and it will add the company's DC Forecast product to guide buying upstream at the warehouse — linking real store demand directly to what the distribution center purchases.
The move builds on a produce rollout that reached all of the chain's roughly 170 stores in 2025. Stater Bros. reports that deployment cut produce shrink, kept shelves fuller, and freed up working capital tied to inventory — results the company describes in general terms rather than hard figures. Executives say the gains were enough to justify scaling the system across the rest of the fresh operation.
The problem it targets is specific to fresh. Stater Bros. says much of its produce buying stayed manual even with conventional forecasting tools in place, because those tools treat demand as static — weekly snapshots and historical averages that break down during promotions and for bulk and catch-weight items. Buyers spent hours pulling data across spreadsheets to answer basic questions, like how many strawberries to order two weeks out. DC Forecast is built for the messier reality of fresh buying: mismatched SKUs, multiple vendors, frequent deliveries.
The shift sits inside a structure the company set up in September, when it folded supply chain oversight under Rebecca Calvin, its executive vice president and chief marketing officer, to pull merchandising, marketing, and logistics into closer alignment. A system that runs store-shelf demand back into warehouse procurement is exactly the kind of integration that reporting line was built to produce.
For an operator, the read is less about grocery and more about how a major IE distribution business is choosing to compete. Stater Bros. isn't chasing more warehouse space; it's wringing more out of the buying decisions inside the warehouse it has, automating the forecasting so its buyers spend time on the floor checking product and working suppliers instead of reconciling spreadsheets. The company has not set a timeline for the broader rollout.