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Customer video: Sprouts Farmers Market

Jul 22, 2025 • 3 min

Sprouts Farmers Market is a US supermarket chain offering a wide selection of natural and organic foods, vitamins and supplements, natural body care products, and household items through their 450+ stores in 25 states. Ryan Foley, Senior Vice President of Merchandise Solutions, and Joe Hurley, Chief Supply Chain Officer, share Sprouts Farmers Market’s journey to transforming their operations from manual spreadsheets to automated optimization with RELEX, achieving improved forecast and replenishment accuracy and reducing spoilage while maintaining their strategic. 

Transcript 

Ryan Foley: Ryan Foley, Senior Vice President of Merchandise Solutions at Sprouts. We’re a national, natural organic grocery store. We are in about 25 states now, 450-ish stores. We weren’t coming from much. 

A lot of what we were doing was manual, right? So we wanted to just kind of look at what was out there, who was kind of the best of the best in the business here. 

Joe Hurley: Joe Hurley, Chief Supply Chain Officer for Sprouts Farmers Market. I’ll start with, in 2019, we basically had Excel. So, I call it Excel acrobatics. So, everybody did their own thing and their little notebook, and Excel spreadsheet, etc. 

So, we partnered with RELEX. It was really important for us to get a forecasting and replenishment system that would scale with us as we grew our, grow our stores and, grow our capabilities not only in produce but beyond just produce. 

Some of the things we were looking for is, essentially forecast accuracy. Having the right product at the right time and the right place, and obviously reduced spoilage. 

RF: In 2024, we started with a handful of categories in our kind of dry grocery department and, you know, first thing, it frees up a lot of the manual work that the team has historically had to do, right? So, that’s that’s a nice piece of it. 

But the, you know, kind of the more exciting part, I think longer term too, is we’re just seeing great performance from some of these optimized categories. You know, we typically, you know, we’ll go through a very thorough kind of category review process that might take 24 or 28 weeks, right?  

Using this automation optimization is almost as simple as a button-push for some of my team members. And we’re seeing very similar results to like, what we see from a very thorough, you know, 4 or 5 or 6-month long category review process without changing the assortment. 

JH: So, we’ve been on a journey of produce stabilization, produce automation, and now we’re getting into one forecast. Today we have one replenishment system doing the store replenishment. And we have RELEX doing the DC replenishment. We want to bring that together and have one forecast for RELEX’s performing the store replenishment. 

So, that’s next for us, along with utilizing supplier collaboration, config, and supplier diagnostics to really dig in to where the root cause is to solve customer service level at the stores. 

RF: The tool has helped us be able to kind of, I would say, not lose our strategy in terms of what we want to do, but we’re seeing great results with just, moving things around on the shelves based on what we’re seeing in those stores. We’ve had a fantastic last couple of years at Sprouts just in general. And what comes with that is not being able to keep certain brands and certain products on the shelf, and optimization has really helped with that as well. 

And we wouldn’t have been able to do all of that within the kind of manual way that we used to do it. So, it’s been a game changer for our team, and it’s allowed them to focus on the more important things too. 

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