Kansas City grocer selects Afresh to run production planning and ordering across its entire store, from fresh to center store
Balls Foods, the independent grocery chain behind Hen House, Price Chopper, SunFresh, and Payless, has selected Afresh for Production Planning and Store Ordering across the entire store. Balls Foods is betting that the way to compete is to differentiate on the perimeter and run a more efficient operation across every department with AI.
Balls Foods will use Afresh Production Planning in produce, meat, deli, and bakery, and Store Ordering across all fresh departments, plus grocery, frozen, dairy, alcohol, and general merchandise. The platform replaces handwritten production guides, manual order writing, legacy CAO, and inconsistent perpetual inventory with AI that builds production plans and writes orders based on real-time inventory, item-specific perishability, and store-specific demand.
The decision came down to fresh. Afresh handles the full complexity of the category, where recipes and ingredients move between departments and timing matters as much as quantity. On the same system, a single decision accounts for everything: how many chickens the deli should roast, when to roast them to meet rotisserie demand, and how many to shred for chicken salad and BBQ chicken. Afresh helps Balls Foods create an edge in fresh and gives the center store that same intelligent ordering, helping the company cut shrink store-wide while it grows prepared foods, one of the highest-margin parts of the store.
“For years, we’ve managed our departments with limited data, manual production guides, and ordering that required experience to fill holes. Afresh gives us production plans our store teams can trust, with the same intelligence running ordering across the store,” said Chris Foltz, EVP Merchandising and Marketing, Balls Foods. “It’s not merely a better version of what we had — it’s a foundation we’ve never had before.”
With Afresh, Balls Foods can set production standards, update recipes, and see inventory performance and stock across stores and banners.
“Most grocery technology was built from the center store out, then extended into fresh. Afresh started by training our AI on billions of fresh data points, building a foundation capable of solving the toughest inventory and forecasting challenges in retail. That’s what allows retailers like Balls Foods to build an AI-first tech stack that unifies fresh, in-store production, and center store on a single platform,” said Matt Schwartz, Chief Executive Officer, Afresh.
