Serving Diverse Markets Across the UK
JJ Food Service Ltd. is an omni-channel bulk food retailer based in Enfield on the northeastern outskirts of London. Often compared to retailer Argos for its flexible approach, JJ Food offers customers multiple ways to purchase and receive goods across its 12 branches throughout the country. Each region served by JJ Food has unique product demand patterns, making centralized planning and inventory management particularly complex.
As an established RELEX customer, JJ Food Service has continuously expanded their use of solutions to drive operational excellence. The company’s business model has evolved significantly over time, shifting toward a direct-to-public model with expanded online click-and-collect services. This transition from primarily serving small retailer customers to direct consumer sales has fundamentally changed their operational requirements and growth trajectory.
From Manual Processes to AI-Driven Planning
JJ Food Service’s partnership with RELEX began in April 2013 when the company was actively searching for supply chain solutions to tackle operational inefficiencies that were draining staff time. A comprehensive analysis phase leveraged JJ Food’s robust historical data, and within just a few weeks, the teams had built an excellent picture of the company’s supply chain performance and identified critical areas requiring attention.
“The analysis phase highlighted the inefficiencies in our operations and showed us where the biggest gains could be made,” says Mushtaque Ahmed, Managing Director of JJ Food Service. “That made the business case and set out our priorities for the implementation.”
The initial forecasting and replenishment implementation addressed several key objectives: managing fresh produce more effectively, improving seasonal item and supplier delivery constraint management, optimizing internal stock transfers between branches, reducing inventory levels, and freeing the buying team from repetitive tasks to focus on strategic sourcing and relationship management.
What started as a three-month pilot quickly expanded when the entire operation was running on the new system by mid-September 2013. “The first, critical achievement was that the whole team was wholeheartedly using the system,” says Ahmed. “They found the system very effective yet simple to use—basic training only took about 30 minutes.”
As JJ Food Service’s business evolved toward direct consumer sales, new challenges emerged. Direct consumers expect competitive pricing, frequent promotions, and personalized offers – requirements that existing manual processes couldn’t efficiently support. Without sophisticated pricing and promotional capabilities, JJ Food Service risked losing customers to competitors and missing opportunities to maximize profit margins. This prompted the company to expand their RELEX implementation, going live with pricing and promotions capabilities in December 2023.
Transforming Operations Through Integrated Solutions
The forecasting and replenishment solutions have fundamentally transformed JJ Food Service’s operations, empowering the purchasing team to optimize stock coverage and manage inventory across all 12 branches through a systematic, rule-based approach. This has reduced reliance on intuition while equipping category managers with precise, evidence-based insights.
Delivery constraints such as the number of full, broken, or mixed pallets as well as minimum order values previously added hours to the order-building process. These rule combinations are now factored in automatically and optimally. “Thanks to the new system we’ve cleaned out a lot of non-performing lines that were falling off our buyers’ radar and improved the availability of the rest,” says Ahmed.
The addition of pricing and promotions capabilities has delivered significant performance improvements across JJ Food Service’s multi-branch network. The company now uses RELEX to set prices for most of their products through AI-driven recommendations that maintain optimal pricing while following business rules like margin maintenance and competitor matching. The platform allows the team to test different promotional strategies before implementation, analyzing the impact of various price changes on sales and profit.
By predicting promotional impact and testing different strategies, JJ Food Service achieved impressive results: 60% increase in promotion sales, nearly 40% growth in total business turnover, and 39% increase in promotion profit. The system’s ability to select the best products and discounts for promotions helped generate an 8.1% uplift in overall gross margin, while promotional sales volume increased by 56%.
The platform has strengthened supplier relationships through automated ordering capabilities and clear visibility into future inventory needs. The system incorporates supplier rules, limits, and discounts automatically while providing suppliers with insight into JJ Food’s future capacity requirements. These improvements have enabled JJ Food Service to attract 30% more supplier support and funding for promotional campaigns.
“Integrating RELEX’s promotion module has enhanced our planning by infusing powerful, data-driven insights at every stage,” explains Mushtaque Ahmed. “Its evidence-based analytics dramatically reduce planning time, while most importantly freeing category managers from relying on habits, emotions, guesswork, and bias.” The automation has delivered tangible time savings of 4-5 hours per day, allowing the team to focus on strategic analysis and decision-making rather than manual processes.
The platform analyzes past promotions and forecasts future campaign performance, enabling the team to identify the most effective items for future campaigns and determine optimal discount levels. Performance evaluation by branch highlights how well products perform at each location, making it easier to tailor promotions to regional preferences across JJ Food Service’s diverse markets.
“If I had to make the decision of choosing RELEX again, I would do it, with double the confidence.”
Mushtaque Ahmed, COO, JJ Food Service Ltd
Delivering Measurable Business Value
JJ Food Service’s success demonstrates the impact of RELEX’s AI-driven supply chain optimization solutions. By implementing comprehensive forecasting and replenishment solutions and expanding into pricing and promotions, the company has achieved operational improvements and financial results. From systematic inventory management across 12 branches to data-driven promotional campaigns that delivered 60% sales increases, these outcomes showcase how RELEX solutions enable companies to optimize complex operations while driving measurable improvements in efficiency and profitability.