UNFI Reduces Out-of-Stocks 5% and Improves Forecast Accuracy 25% with RELEX Solutions

Jun 19, 2026 • 4 min

UNFI partnered with RELEX to consolidate five legacy systems into a single, scalable forecasting and replenishment platform across 48 distribution centers. See how unified data, AI-driven forecasting, and a configurable platform are helping UNFI reduce out-of-stocks and improve fill rates for 30,000 customers.

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Transcript

Scott Rochwarg, SVP Procurement Inbound Logistics, UNFI

Hi, I’m Scott Roquwagen. I’m the senior vice president of procurement and logistics at UNFI, so responsible for all of our inventory management and service levels to all of our customers. UNFI is celebrating its fiftieth year of operations this year founded by Michael Funk fifty years ago, delivering food out of his van.

In that spirit of delivering food to our customers, we have thirty thousand total customers today. We operate forty eight distribution centers strategically across the United States and have over two and thirty thousand unique products that we offer our customer base. We had a few goals at UNFI when we looked to implement the RELEX platform. First of all, we were on many different legacy platforms at the time.

And one of our main goals was to get to a single modern platform that we can leverage across our business and that’s scalable. So as I mentioned earlier, our business is quite large, very complicated group of customers base that we have, a very diverse set of suppliers, and we needed a platform that could allow us to forecast and replenish at scale and accuracy. We went through a pretty thoughtful process, looked at a lot of different options in the industry as it relates to replenishment and forecasting softwares. And RELEX really stood out for a few reasons.

One was that it’s scalable, so it can meet the needs of our large growing business. It’s also highly configurable. So as a distributor, we’re sitting in between retail customers and the CPG industry. And in that space, we knew that we had uniqueness that needed to be accommodated in a platform and RELEX could prove that they could do that for us.

There were a handful of ways that RELEX differentiated itself through the selection process. One was the fact that it’s a cloud based platform, so we’re getting updates as they’re available and we’re not waiting for on prem updates that have historically slowed us down. Second, it has AI capabilities built in and a strong AI roadmap that RELEX has shared with us that we’re going be part of creating together in the future. Both of those are exciting reasons to pick RELEX over the other options we had.

Our implementation process took longer than we anticipated it taking. We were coming from a very complex starting point. With five different business systems at UNFI, we had to do a lot of work to harmonize that data and make sure that everything we were getting to RELEX was what was needed to run the platform successfully. What we also learned through the process is having a really tight connection between our IT teams and business teams on the UNFI side and engaging with RELEX in a single way drove a lot of ability to deliver on the value that we were expecting from the RELEX platform.

Throughout the process with RELEX, we did learn things in RELEX that didn’t meet our exact specification. And those were the times that we had to go back and work with RELEX to make it work for UNFI. And for each of those, were able to accomplish that with RELEX as a partner. Clearly getting onto a single modern platform was one of our objectives, but that really is a starting point for us now.

So now we’re on a modern platform. We want to be able to collaborate both with our supplier community and our customer community in more enhanced ways. So setting a longer plan together, improving on time and full into our distribution centers, and more importantly, on time and full to our customer base. With that, we also, of course, want to focus on improving our capital structure and how we manage our inventories to support the business.

From the start, we knew that we needed to have a strong dedicated team supporting the project from the UNFI team. We took a handful of folks from the business, dedicated them to the implementation of the RELEX platform, and throughout that not only became super users on the platform that we rely on heavily now while we’re live, but also those folks became huge change agents in our organization to make sure that we made the process changes that needed to occur to successfully leverage RELEX at UNFI. We’ve set pretty aggressive goals with the RELEX platform to deliver against over the coming years at UNFI.

Initially, we’ve seen some of those goals beyond what we expected coming out the gate. So far, we’ve seen about a five percent reduction in our out of stocks and a twenty five percent improvement in our forecast error rate. Both of those are going to generate improved working capital and fill rate improvements to our customers. It’s still early, though.

We expect to see a lot more benefits as we continue to tweak the platform and take advantage of all the other capabilities that RELEX brings now that we’re fully on board.

UNFI Reduces Out-of-Stocks 5% and Improves Forecast Accuracy 25% with RELEX Solutions

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