RELEX offers more advanced forecasting than Afresh thanks to proven models, built-in demand drivers, hierarchical forecasts, forecast explainability, and AI agents, all housed on a unified platform to speed up time-to-value.

Afresh has a more limited scope of experience and capabilities, having only been established in 2017 to focus on fresh planning alone¹⁴. Its capabilities and models therefore do not have the maturity that RELEX’s models have attained over 20 years of use in the retail and grocery sectors.

Afresh’s forecasting abilities also use neural networks to provide probability distributions for demand ranges. Neural networks are effective at pattern recognition, but they generally don’t surface why they calculated a certain forecast, providing little to no visibility into how the system’s calculations are weighted and controlled.¹⁵

RELEX, on the other hand, provides grocery retailers with:

1. Proven models: RELEX’s models have been tailored to grocery’s industry-specific challenges and refined using RELEX’s 20 years of retail expertise.
2. Built-in demand drivers: The RELEX forecasting solution integrates ~300 out-of-box demand drivers, including weather, events, supplier lead times, cannibalization, and halo effects.
3. Hierarchical forecasts: RELEX provides granular forecasts that can be aggregated from the item-store-day level up to the category-chain-week level.
4. Forecast explainability: The RELEX model is a transparent, machine learning-based system. Users can see the system’s “regressor coefficients” which specify how heavily the model has weighted a demand-influencing factor, allowing users to compare how the same factor affects the same SKU in different locations or markets.
5. Agentic AI: RELEX released its first forecasting and replenishment agents for retail planning in March 2026. These agents are built on a platform designed to manage and automate decision-making at enterprise scale, so retailers can implement agentic innovations that grow with their businesses and continue delivering measurable value over time.
6. Unified planning: The RELEX unified platform links forecasting capabilities from fresh and center store to supply chain and merchandising functions, using one data pool to align decisions across planning teams and create a more cohesive and strategic planning process.

RELEX outperforms Afresh at multi-echelon grocery retail planning because it has more expertise and a wider scope of fully developed capabilities proven to scale across a global customer base.

Afresh has limited experience and unproven models when it comes to multi-echelon planning

Afresh has only recently launched its DC-to-store buying solution with a limited pool of customers¹⁶. And its forecasting only supports planning horizons up to around a month, which isn’t long enough for buyers planning around seasonal products, import flows, or long supplier lead times. ¹⁷There are no publicly documented, quantified proof points for its DC solution generally available yet, and the solution’s scalability is unproven.

RELEX has industry-proven multi-echelon planning capabilities

With 20 years of experience behind it, RELEX has developed sophisticated multi-echelon forecasting and replenishment solutions that:

• Calculate forecasts across planning horizons up to 2+ years, accommodating long lead-time and seasonal items.
• Provide replenishment, scenario planning, and prioritized exceptions across all categories and products.
• Enable forecast-driven planning from vendor to DC to satellite DC to store, simultaneously coordinating store replenishment, DC purchasing, production planning, supplier collaboration, and markdown decisions.
• Automatically tune safety stock on the SKU-day-node level using probabilistic, service level-aware optimization.
• Scale as assortments expand, incorporating factors like perishability, promotions, pricing, seasonality, weather events, inventory levels, and more.
• Support wholesale and retail planning on a single platform.

RELEX offers more comprehensive fresh and store planning capabilities than Afresh because RELEX’s capabilities match and exceed the scope of Afresh’s current offerings.

Afresh offers:¹⁸

• Store Ordering
• Production Planning
• Period Ending Inventory
• Recipe Management
• DC Buying

RELEX Store Operations is a single AI-native platform whose capabilities include:

• Fresh Store Ordering: Uses AI to improve demand forecasting and automated ordering for fresh categories (produce, meat, seafood, bakery, deli, dairy, and floral), including non-barcoded and loose items.
• Full Store Ordering: Uses AI to improve forecasting and ordering across the full store assortment, including fresh, center store, DSD, and more.
• In-Store Production Planning: Auto-generates demand-driven production schedules for bakery, deli, butcher, and prepared foods by time of day, with intraday tracking.
• True Inventory: Continuously corrects on-hand records using AI so balances stay accurate at the daily level, rather than being reconciled only at period end; detects anomalies, automates balance corrections, and surfaces prioritized count tasks.
• Recipe Management: Manages recipe lifecycles including bill of materials, costing, allergen tagging, yields, and variant management.
• Store-to-DC planning integration: Connects to RELEX’s end-to-end planning platform, including proven DC buying, multi-echelon forecasting, replenishment, and inventory optimization, so store and DC decisions use the same demand signal.
• Store Markdown Optimization: Provides predictive shelf-life tracking per batch with AI-optimized markdown timing and depth; feeds marked-down article counts back into other planning processes like forecasting and replenishment.
• Expiry Date Management: Continuously monitors expirations with first-expired, first-out (FEFO) alerts, compliance tracking, and waste analytics; requires no IT integration.
• Mobile-Augmented Store Execution: Gives users access to a mobile-first execution layer for replenishment workflows, planogram delivery, and space execution.

Does RELEX have purpose-built fresh store ordering capabilities?¹⁹

Yes, RELEX Store Operations provides purpose-built fresh store ordering capabilities that help grocery retailers maintain fresh inventory, increase customer satisfaction, and minimize waste-related costs for more profitable planning.

RELEX’s model gives grocery retailers:

1. Scalability: RELEX’s model uses an algorithmic equation, not simulations, to calculate accurate probabilities that inform ordering decisions. These equations weigh the uncertainty of variables, remaining nuanced enough to maintain accuracy but operationally lean enough to scale easily with growing business networks and product portfolios.
2. Full planning context: The RELEX algorithm’s flexibility makes it well-suited to fresh planning because it can track and accommodate the gradually changing spoilage states of the fresh products it analyzes. Its granular calculations provide clear, nuanced planning context for planners trying to determine replenishment and markdown needs.
3. FIFO-aware spoilage information: The RELEX Store Operations model retains product type, quantity, arrival date, and remaining shelf-life information for every inventory batch. It also applies first-in, first-out (FIFO) logic to inventory records. This approach helps planners track spoilage rates across a product type by batch for strategic ordering decisions driven by real-world data, not statistical estimations.

Afresh mentions AI agents on its website but provides little information about their development and application.²⁰

RELEX, meanwhile, already has agents available across planning functions, having used its extensive background in AI technology and industry-specific use cases as a springboard into agentic deployment. Despite how new agentic AI is to the market, RELEX already has an impressive track record:

• Applied expertise: RELEX established and shared its overall AI strategy and its approach to agentic development early on.
• Early momentum: RELEX launched Rebot, the first gen AI assistant for supply chain and retail planning, in 2023. Rebot is now used daily by customers like Beijer Byggmaterial, who have integrated it into workflows to enhance planner expertise, provide autonomous troubleshooting, and accelerate adoption.
• Live agents: RELEX has an explicit framework of retail forecasting and promotions planning agents already available; the company has also launched the Store Support AI agent, which delivers instant order explanations and issue resolution for in-store employees.
• Continued innovation: RELEX continues exploring new technological opportunities, like RELEX Open, that will allow customers to deploy proven solutions, connect their own AI, and build more capabilities on a single foundation.
• Transparency and control: The RELEX business rules engine (BRE) provides a graphical interface where human planners can monitor and govern the thresholds and automations that agents use to perform planning tasks autonomously.

RELEX aims to remain at the forefront of these emerging technologies to ensure its customers get the most out of their technology investments far into the future.