How Albert Heijn uses AI

Albert Heijn, the Dutch supermarket brand of Ahold Delhaize, gives store associates an AI assistant that answers questions about product locations, stock levels, prices and promotions. Before building it, the team ran a test app in which people answered associates' questions on the back end, which showed that most questions concerned products and produced about 250,000 requests a month. Ahold Delhaize reports more than 80,000 colleagues using the assistant in September 2026.

Albert Heijn, the leading supermarket chain in the Netherlands with more than 1,200 stores, forecasts daily sales for more than 15 million store and item combinations more than five weeks ahead, which its VP of Product Operations describes as almost one billion predictions a day, with the aim of bringing just enough stock to each store and cutting food waste. The retailer says it hopes forecasting will cut its total food waste by more than 10%, a target rather than a result. A related Dynamic Markdown initiative raises discounts on electronic shelf labels during the day for products close to their date, and the story says it now saves 250,000 kilos of wasted food per year.

Albert Heijn, the Ahold Delhaize supermarket chain in the Netherlands, built an in house algorithm that automatically discounts fresh produce, chicken and fish as their best before date approaches, so stock is cleared by the end of the day instead of thrown away. The algorithm was advised by anti waste specialist Wasteless and first tested with Pricer's electronic shelf label hardware in one store in 2019. It is now rolled out to every Albert Heijn store fitted with electronic shelf labels, working with three fixed discount levels (25%, 40% and 70%) that the software chooses per product from sales history, local and seasonal patterns, weather and current stock.