Berry Gardens adopts AI to increase efficiency and reduce food waste

By Peak on February 25, 2022

We're delighted to announce that Berry Gardens, the UK’s largest supplier of berries and cherries, has chosen to partner with Peak.

The co-operative of British berry growers will be leveraging Decision Intelligence to increase their responsiveness to customers, drive efficiencies within the business and minimize food waste.

Decision Intelligence (DI) is the commercial application of AI to the decision making process. It is outcome focused, and so requires models to be built with a business objective in mind. Sitting across an organization’s entire dataset, DI is uniquely placed to optimize across the value chain. It is helping some of the world’s leading brands, including PepsiCo, Nike, Molson Coors and KFC, to reduce inventory, reduce stock movements and maximize customer service.

The route to Decision Intelligence

There are three requirements every business needs to be successful with DI:

An AI-ready data set
An intelligence customized to the business built on this data
An interface in which line-of-business users can engage with a model

This third step is crucial. Even the most accurate and complex predictive models cannot drive value alone, they need iteration based on feedback from the commercial teams using them – a step most AI strategies are missing.

Decision Intelligence allows for the gradual development of a connected intelligence. This means businesses can focus on building an application to meet one objective, and later add in additional solutions that serve other teams or departments.

Berry Gardens have many core business systems that hold valuable data, they are working with the Peak team to leverage this data to drive better decisions across multiple business functions. The initial focus of the partnership will be optimizing business critical decisions on customer stock allocation. This will help the Berry Garden’s team to maximize customer service, minimize waste, reduce food miles and cut out hours of manual data manipulation.

I have long held a strong belief that Decision Intelligence can make a real difference in the fresh produce industry. The team at Berry Gardens have the vision and the appetite to lead the industry and I’m delighted to count them as our first fresh produce customer.

Joseph Story

Account Director at Peak

As a business we have a myriad of different systems which we use to hold valuable data and make critical decisions on a day to day basis. We are thrilled to be working with Peak to see how Decision Intelligence can help streamline these processes across a variety of different business functions. Ultimately, we hope such technology will help us provide a better, more accurate service for our customers, whilst minimizing food waste, reducing food-miles and optimizing our resources.

Robert Harrison

Commercial Director at Berry Gardens

How is DI being leveraged in agriculture?

While this is the first application of DI to the fresh produce sector, the technology is already being leveraged successfully within agriculture. Machinery manufacturer Fotenix uses machine learning enabled cameras to monitor crop health, utilizing Peak’s Decision Intelligence platform to assess images of plants at scale.

The Fotenix system analyzes numerous data sources, among them historical images of diseased crops, to determine the needs of individual plants and anticipate crop issues in real time, providing actionable decisions for farmers to take. The company utilizes DI across a range of use cases. For one soft fruit producer in the UK, its solution resulted in a 20% reduction in cost per hectare and a 10% total increase in crop yields. If deployed at scale, these solutions could help to address food insecurity by enabling farmers to grow more food more efficiently; using fewer resources to feed more.