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How Sprouts Farmers Market Transformed Store Replenishment with RELEX

Jun 4, 2026 • 3 min

Sprouts Farmers Market partnered with RELEX to unify store and DC replenishment into a single, trusted system built with input from the people who use it daily. See how guided workflows, smarter forecasting, and AI-powered automation are helping store teams reclaim time, reduce out-of-stocks, and keep fresh product moving.

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Transcript

Fresh is at the heart of everything Sprouts does, but delivering fresh every day across hundreds of stores is complex. It takes accurate data, simple workflows, and systems store teams can trust.

So at Sprouts, we have a replenishment system in the stores that’s different than the replenishment system in the DCs. And as you can imagine, when you have two systems that are bifurcated and don’t necessarily communicate the same way, you have inconsistencies in the way how we replenish. And those are the challenges that we were set forth to solve going through the Sprouts Replenishment System.

The Sprouts Replenishment System, or SRS, has a new approach to forecasting, ordering, and inventory management.

Sprouts and RELEX have been on a journey together that started with getting the fundamentals right. The first phase was all about how we plumbed the RELEX tool and how the teams were utilizing it. Once we were able to go through and correct some of the things that we set up, we were able to move on to the next phase to be able to set up automations around replenishment. After we completed this kind of DC setup, setting up the foundation, we were able to move and earn our way into the stores.

Well, I know to me trust is never a given. It’s always earned. And I’m one of those people, I have to look at something, I have to see the results, and I want to understand the entire process start to finish. And by showing me how it works, why it came to whatever conclusion it did, it helps me buy in and understand what’s going on so that I know I can trust the output of the tool I’m using.

This is not a finished product rolled out overnight. It is being tested in real stores, shaped by feedback, and improved together. I started off in the stores as well as a clerk and then as a manager. And never has anybody from the office, or a software company, come and ask us to help build a tool. This is truly a tool built from the stores up.

Having guided workflows is really going to help our team members day to day. Having clear order proposals is going to help build their trust in this system, and they’re just going to gain so many hours back in the day so they can help customers and train new team members. So this is really going to improve their day to day experience.

A particular case came up early as we were trying out our new guided count system. We were going through our frozen department, and we discovered right away that we had an item that was being surfaced by the system to count, so they’d removed the item. And so in discovering that, we were able to not only rectify the schematic issue, but we were able to get that item back in stock and continue to generate sales on it, which is good for us, and it’s great for our vendor partners as well.

As I reflect over the course of last year and seeing the store team members actually using the SRS solution, it’s very rewarding to really see how we’re able to make team members’ lives much easier on a day in, day out basis. It’s one of the core components of what we went into this endeavour, focusing on simplicity, transparency, and just ensuring that store team members are able to adopt a solution that they really like and love to use.

Moving to SRS really, to me, means bringing Sprouts into the future, leveraging the potential of AI and getting our company ahead of our competition. This is just the beginning of the Sprouts Replenishment System journey.

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