Parfetts has partnered with Cerve, the operating system for the food and beverage supply chain, to introduce agentic AI across its supplier data. The investment will turn fragmented information into actionable commercial insight as the employee-owned wholesaler targets £1bn in turnover.
Under the multi-year partnership, Cerve will bring together information from Parfetts’ emails, files and existing systems, giving its trading team one clear view of supplier pricing, promotions, terms and product performance.
The investment forms part of Parfetts’ strategy to grow intelligently and sustainably while making the business easier for suppliers to work with.
Commercial information from suppliers can arrive across emails, spreadsheets and documents in numerous formats. This makes it time-consuming for the trading team to build a complete picture of supplier activity and to identify changes or opportunities that require attention.
Cheryl Hope, Trading Director at Parfetts, said: “Our supplier relationships are central to the strength of our offer, but the volume and variety of commercial information involved can make it difficult to identify and act on every opportunity.
“Cerve will give our team clearer, more consistent insight without creating additional administration for suppliers. This will support better-informed data-led conversations, faster decisions and stronger joint business plans.”
Cerve’s agentic AI platform will process and structure the information suppliers already provide, creating a consistent source of commercial intelligence for Parfetts trading team.
Suppliers will not need to log in to a new portal, learn another system, or complete additional forms. They will continue to work through their existing channels, while Cerve interprets the information received, identifies relevant changes and highlights areas that may require action.
Dan Mazig, Founder and CEO of Cerve, said: “Parfetts’ scale, growth ambition and appetite for innovation make it an ideal partner for demonstrating how agentic AI can enable better decision-making and closer collaboration in food and beverage.
“The Parfetts leadership team is exceptional at spotting where the gaps are and turning them into a competitive advantage. With this foundation, Parfetts can deploy agents across the business and operate faster, with more control and visibility.”
The platform will help Parfetts assess product and promotional performance, spot changes across its supplier base and respond more quickly to emerging commercial opportunities.
Suppliers are expected to benefit from clearer reporting, more informed trading conversations and greater visibility of opportunities for joint growth. The resulting insight will also help Parfetts strengthen its ranges, promotions and availability for Go Local retailers.
Guy Swindell, Joint Managing Director at Parfetts, said: “Our ambition to reach £1bn in turnover depends on investing in capabilities that allow us to grow intelligently and sustainably.
“Cerve will help us operate more efficiently and work even more closely with our suppliers, while ensuring the Parfetts trading team remains in control of commercial decisions. Ultimately, that will contribute to a stronger proposition for our retailers, customers and employee owners.”
The partnership is now being implemented, and the team is expected to begin using the platform in October.
Richard Bone, Commercial Director at Parfetts, tells Wholesale Manager more about how the AI will benefit the business.
Parfetts is teaming up with Cerve to introduce Agentic AI across its supplier data. Can you tell us a bit more about what that means and how it can benefit the business?
What we’re doing initially is trying to solve a very specific problem. We’ve done a lot of work in examining our processes and procedures. We’ve identified one in particular, which is our promotional process, how we collate and design our three-weekly promotions. There are 17 of those a year. It’s a lot of admin required, and the reason there’s a lot of admin required in that is suppliers all send their information around what they want to promote and what kind of pricing and mechanics they want to put against those promotions, they all send that individually. It might be a spreadsheet, it might be an email, it might be a WhatsApp, it could be any kind of communication.
We have identified that we spend a lot of admin time collating that information for a promotion. What the new AI platform and various processes within Cerve is going to allow us to do is read that information that comes from the supplier. We’re not going to ask the supplier to give us anything different. They’re going to give us exactly what they currently give us in whatever format they want to give it to us. But then the AI is going to allow us to standardise that information into a cube of data for any given promotional period, which is then going to allow the trading team less time creating that cube of data, and more time looking at that cube of data and making commercial decisions around that data that they’ve got.
Would there be a substantial cost involved for Parfetts?
We can’t get into what the costs are, we have decided that it’s a significant opportunity for us, and we have invested accordingly.
How long will it take until this new process goes live?
We have been running the design of it and the initial implementation for probably six months now. We are now looking at the final implementation. We are building what we call Pulse Promotions, which is the front end of Cerve. We’re building that now, and we’re going to have a working prototype of that live by October, essentially in time for our supplier engagement.
If anyone in your business needs this information, will it be there in front of them on their smartphone for them to instantly access it?
It’s not on a smartphone, it’s a PC based tool. The trading managers will have instant access to the information as soon as the supplier sends it to us. It will be in one consolidated place, and they’ll see it on a custom built bespoke front end.
What challenges do you anticipate your business will face, if any, in taking on this AI?
We have got to think about accuracy. I think everybody who puts any kind of AI solution in has to be cognisant of the accuracy issue. We’re not going to completely take anybody out the loop. This is all about giving people quicker access to the information they already get. We are thinking about accuracy, and then obviously there is governance and security around that because some of it is quite commercially sensitive information. We have got rails in place to ensure that only the people that need that information can get to it.
Are there any benefits for suppliers?
The big benefit for the suppliers is they don’t really have to do anything different. We’re not asking them to go onto a new portal and send us all different kinds of information. They will send us whatever they currently send us. The benefit that the buyer will see is quicker turnaround of those promotions, which will then allow better commercial discussions between the trading team and the suppliers. Because the trading team have better access to those completed promotions.
Are Parfetts the first in the industry to do this, or are competitors doing this already?
Cerve may or may not be dealing with other people on a similar basis, we don’t know. We think we’re creating the best solution for our supply partners, colleagues and retailers.
Will this be of benefit to Go Local retailers?
None of the Go Local retailers will directly interact with the system. It’s an internal system, so it’s not going to necessarily be visible to them. What they should benefit from is the better promotions that we’re going to end up generating as a result, better ranges. Ultimately, as we start to think about other applications for this system, availability should improve. There should be lots of knock-on benefits to our retailers.
How do you think introducing agentic AI will ultimately help Parfetts reach its goal of £1 billion in turnover?
It’s part of our journey towards reaching that goal. It’s not going to create any growth on its own but it will help by having people spend less time doing manual non-value adding tasks, more time making commercially astute decisions, generating better promotions, having better ranges. We can start to think about demand planning in our relationships with suppliers. That whole piece should come together. It’s all geared towards that ambition. But this is not the one thing that’s going to make that happen.
Is there anything you want to add?
We’re not looking at AI for AI’s sake, we are identifying issues and where AI can help us to solve those issues, then we will absolutely go for it.
I think it’s part of a much wider investment in technology across the business. In recent months, we have seen the Go for Growth platform that gives retailers advice, and that’s web based as well. It provides really useful information that will help the businesses grow. That is right across the business. There’s money being invested in technology to make things faster and more efficient.
Where we think we can really make a difference with that is this integration piece. We don’t want things fragmented and separate systems for the sake of separate systems. It all needs to come together to be a whole part of its ecosystem that drives benefits for the entire supply chain.
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