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RELEX Helps Farm Boy to Boost Supply Chain Efficiency

Jan 15, 2017 3 min

Farm Boy Inc., Ontario’s fastest growing fresh food retailer today announced that they have gone live with the RELEX supply chain management system helping to offer a superior shopping experience to its customers while reducing food waste.

The company, with 23 stores across Ontario, Canada, offers fresh produce, meat, fish, deli goods and fresh-made, restaurant-style meals to consumers who appreciate its commitment to quality and freshness. Farm Boy carries more than 4000 products with prominent organic and artisanal ranges with an emphasis on local, healthy, wholesome ingredients across its assortment.

With expansion plans underway, including new store openings, Farm Boy’s growth rate of 25-30% presents the company with new and complex inventory and supply chain management challenges. In order to ensure that they continue to maintain their freshness, quality and outstanding customer shopping experience during this period of rapid growth, the company turned to RELEX.

“The RELEX system helps us achieve our objective of having the right amount of product, at the right place and at the right time. This objective is key to achieving our ultimate goal of delivering an outstanding experience that includes primarily fresh, perishable items,” says Shawn Linton, Vice-President, Supply Chain & I.T. at Farm Boy. “It was difficult to find a supply chain system that performed better than our existing in-house, highly-evolved demand planning system. RELEX has the tools we need to optimize our inventory and improve our forecasting helping to ensure that as we grow, our customers can continue to find all of the great products they love, at the peak of freshness.”

The RELEX system helps us achieve our objective of having the right amount of product, at the right place and at the right time.

RELEX‘s flexible systems are able to track sell-by and use-by dates, forecast sales and promotions uplift, seasonal variations, weather and many other attributes vital to good inventory management for short shelf-life produce. Some fresh food retailers have raised their availability to almost 99% using RELEX, and through good demand planning they can offer the freshest produce while also cutting spoilage.

“Farm Boy is the perfect company for us to partner with in North America,” says RELEX co-founder and President of North America, Michael Falck. “Forecasting and replenishing fresh and short shelf-life goods is one of the toughest things to do in retail. If a replenishment planning system can do that it can do almost anything. We are confident that like the high-end food retailers across Europe, Farm Boy will be very enthusiastic about their results with RELEX and we look forward to bringing Farm Boy the latest ideas and technology to support their growth.”

About Farm Boy
Selected as one of Canada’s 50 Best Managed Companies, Farm Boy provides a unique and friendly, fresh market shopping experience.

Recognized for its fresh produce, premium meats, extensive line of private label items, and its popular fresh prepared Farm Boy™ Kitchen take home meals, the company’s success has enabled it to grow to 23 stores in Ottawa, Cornwall, Kingston, Whitby, Pickering and Southwestern Ontario with further expansion plans underway.

More information: www.farmboy.ca