AWS for Industries
How an Old-fashioned Doorstep Delivery of Bottled Milk is Making a Comeback Powered by AI-Driven Supply Chain
An old concept of milk delivered to customer doorstep is making a big come back in fresh new ways. Home milk delivery from local dairy farms was a staple for many households in the 1950s and ’60s. With the rise of the supermarkets and refrigeration becoming widely available, the doorstep delivery of fresh milk went into a steep decline.
Fast-forward to today’s modern consumer. Customers demand sustainability and waste reduction, knowledge of where their food comes from, and support for their local economies and small businesses. Furthermore, they are recognizing the importance of local communities. The result? Companies big and small are paving new paths to deliver products and services aligned to ethical commerce.
For example, retailers and CPGs are leveraging modern technology in order to forecast demand. In the UK, one such company, the Modern Milkman, aims to reduce waste and bring good feelings to the doorstep of customers with various groceries in return and reuse packaging, all delivered free of single-use plastic! Think: glass-bottled, fresh milk delivered to customers’ doorsteps while reducing plastic and waste products.
The Modern Milkman is a UK-based community- and sustainability-focused retailer working with independent farmers and suppliers to deliver fresh milk, eggs, fruit, vegetables, baked goods, and other groceries in sustainable packaging. The company has experienced exponential growth, as consumers are seeking a convenient and accessible delivery service that reduces environmental impact. The Modern Milkman has modernized an old-fashioned concept of doorstep delivery, and it is leveraging cloud technology and Artificial Intelligence(AI)-driven supply chain forecasting to optimize delivery and availability.
AI has been proven to radically improve the entire Retail and CPG enterprise, especially regarding demand forecasting.
Demand Forecasting AI Customer Success Story
The Modern Milkman selected Peak to streamline its digital delivery platform, optimize operations, and prevent food waste. Specifically, the company implemented Peak’s platform, built on AWS, in order to improve demand forecasting and ensure that the right products are in stock in its local grocery hubs for accurate fulfillment of customer orders. According to Simon Mellin, The Modern Milkman’s founder and CEO, “We’ve experienced exponential growth as a business, with a focus on delivering groceries to customers efficiently and in an environmentally sustainable way. A huge part of this success comes down to the supply chain and operations.”
Peak’s platform offers a Data Bridge connecting to data in Snowflake, so The Modern Milkman utilizes the connectors to accelerate its data analysis by scheduling data imports and streamlining AI and ML model set-ups.
The Modern Milkman utilizes Peak’s platform to combine and analyze shelf-life information, customer orders, and supply and warehouse data, thereby instantly making predictions that ensure customers receive complete orders without substitutions. This is especially important since most customers receive deliveries multiple times a week in order to reduce food spoilage. According to Wrap, nearly one-third of all food produced globally is lost or wasted, accounting for 8-10 % of total greenhouse gas emissions. CEO Mellin said, “With Peak’s Decision Intelligence platform, we can have a complete view of the supply chain, thereby enabling us to make better decisions about stock, ordering, and warehouse operations. With a better overview of our supply chain, we can prevent waste not only at an operational level, but also in the customer’s daily life, as we deliver up to three times a week to prevent food waste.”
Working with Peak, The Modern Milkman utilizes AWS compute, storage, and database services to power innovation. The Modern Milkman benefits from the flexible, scalable microservices-based architecture by incorporating Amazon SageMaker, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Redshift, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk in order to provide an agile, secure, and scalable platform.
To learn more about how The Modern Milkman is benefiting from an AI solution in the supply chain and the results they are seeing, check out the webinar with AWS, The Modern Milkman and Peak, on October 7.
Ready to unlock the power of your supply chain data with AI? AWS is here to help. Contact your account team today to get started.
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AWS Retail Partner Spotlight
Peak is a Decision Intelligence company, and an AWS Retail Competency partner, powering commercial decision-making for companies around the world, including brands such as Nike, KFC, PepsiCo, and Superdry. Peak’s pioneering CODI platform embeds AI across sales, marketing, planning, and supply chains to transform decision-making and accelerate revenue, profits, and sustainability.