Walk into any Indian supermarket and ask the manager about expiry tracking. You'll get one of three answers: "We check manually," "We have a system" (which nobody uses), or an uncomfortable silence.
The reality is brutal. Indian retail loses an estimated 2-3% of revenue to expired products annually. For a store doing ₹50 lakh monthly, that's ₹12-18 lakh gone every year. Not to mention the customer trust lost when someone picks up an expired packet of biscuits.
The obvious solution doesn't work
The standard advice is simple: implement FIFO (First In, First Out), train staff, use spreadsheets. Every retail consultant will tell you this. It sounds reasonable.
It fails almost every time. Here's why:
- Staff turnover is constant. The person you trained last month is gone. The new person doesn't know the system.
- Peak hours kill discipline. When there's a queue of 20 customers, nobody's checking expiry dates during restocking.
- Spreadsheets require discipline. Manual data entry is the first thing that gets skipped when things get busy.
- The problem is invisible. Unlike theft, you don't see expired products walking out the door. The loss is hidden until inventory time.
What we learned from watching stores fail
Before building ShelfLife Pro, we spent months in supermarkets. Not as consultants—as observers. We watched how staff actually worked, not how they said they worked.
Three patterns emerged:
Pattern 1: The "I'll do it later" trap. Expiry checking is always urgent but never immediate. There's always something more pressing—a customer complaint, a delivery arrival, a billing issue. Expiry tracking gets pushed to "later," and later never comes.
Pattern 2: Information fragmentation. Even stores with systems had the data scattered—some in registers, some in apps, some in people's heads. Nobody had a complete picture of what was expiring when.
Pattern 3: Action paralysis. When staff did find products nearing expiry, they often didn't know what to do. Mark it down? Pull it? Tell someone? The decision tree was unclear, so nothing happened.
What actually works
The solution isn't better training or more discipline. It's building a system that works with how people actually behave.
Alerts, not reports. Nobody reads daily expiry reports. But everyone notices a push notification that says "12 products expiring in 3 days." The system has to interrupt, not inform.
Prescriptive actions. "SKU X is expiring" is useless. "Move SKU X to clearance shelf and apply 20% markdown" is actionable. The system should tell people exactly what to do.
Mobile-first everything. Staff aren't sitting at computers. They're walking the floor with phones in their pockets. If the system doesn't work on mobile, it doesn't work.
Minimal data entry. Every manual input is a failure point. Barcode scanning, image recognition, automatic date extraction—whatever reduces typing reduces errors.
The result
Stores using ShelfLife Pro consistently see 60-80% reduction in expiry losses within the first three months. Not because their staff suddenly became more disciplined, but because the system removed the need for discipline.
The best processes are the ones that don't require willpower. They just happen.
"We used to write off ₹40,000 in expired products monthly. Last month it was ₹6,000. Same staff, same products, different system."
— Store manager, Hyderabad
The bigger lesson
This pattern—solutions that require discipline failing, solutions that work with human nature succeeding—applies far beyond expiry tracking. It's why most business software fails. It's designed for how people should work, not how they actually do.
When you're building tools for busy people in chaotic environments, the question isn't "What's the right way to do this?" It's "What will people actually do?"
Design for that, and you might build something that works.