Excerpt from last week's FoodTech Weekly conversation Franz Seubert of AIPERIA (https://lnkd.in/dcv8N56U):
‘What really motivates me, what keeps me up at night, is that we have a nice opportunity for a win-win-win. Customers buy our products to save money, but in the process they cut food waste. And since they save money with our solution, we can make money too! It’s a nice thing’, says Franz Seubert, co-founder & MD of AIPERIA.
Franz grew up in his father’s small supermarket in the German countryside: ‘I experienced how food ends up in the trash due to poor planning. Our store was family-owned, so this hurt. We for example had to throw out pretzels in the evenings. Later in my life I worked for (popular food discount chain) Aldi and saw the same problem there.’
After a Masters in Information Systems at The Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg, Franz met his co-founders Fabian Taigel and Jan Meller: ‘This was a heureka moment. They had essentially developed the solution for the food waste problem I had experienced my whole life.’
AIPERIA was born, and decided to initially focus on food waste in baked goods: ‘It’s hard for bakeries to forecast demand, and a baked product you don’t sell today, you have to throw out in the evening’, Franz notes. The company built a solution that it offered for free to bakeries, and it worked.
AIPERIA focuses on the fresh and ultra fresh goods, such as bakery, flower, and grab-and-go food — all products with high inherent uncertainty in the forecasts. The company’s solution cleans POS data and delivery data, and combines the data with 150 different factors such as store location, school holidays, day of week, weather (number of sun hours, wind etc), competing local stores, sales promotions, and so on. The algorithm will then tell the supermarket to for example order exactly 40 pretzels to maximize profits. ‘Just like a weather forecast, we can transmit order forecasts 2 weeks prior, and the forecast gets more accurate the closer to the target date; our forecasts are above 90% accurate’, Franz explains.
AIPERIA’s customers typically see a reduction in food waste of up to 1/3. This can save €1,200 per month for a single bakery store — which is very significant.
The company has 2,500 stores under contract; all are in Germany, although AIPERIA is now expanding to Austria, Switzerland, and the U.K.
AIPERIA has 60 FTEs and recently closed a €7.5M Series A round, led by ETF Partners.
Franz is interested in talking to potential customers, ‘like a Head of Supply Chain for Sainsburys or Lidl UK’. He’s also eager to chat with manufacturers or producers, such as huge industrial bakeries that deliver to the food retail sector. And he wants to get a better grasp of the key events focused on food retail in different markets, where AIPERIA can present itself and meet decision makers. Franz can be reached via LinkedIn.
Director of KM ZERO Food Innovation Hub
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