Client Overview
A leading U.S. food waste recycling company, wanted to expand its footprint in the grocery retail sector – a market generating millions of tons of waste each year and ripe with potential.
The Challenge
Despite strong recycling expertise, the client lacked visibility into where to expand and which retailers to target. Without granular data into regional waste patterns, grocery chains’ sustainability priorities, and competitive activity, they risked misallocating resources and overlooking high-value opportunities. Manual data gathering and analysis would have demanded months of effort, delaying their go-to-market plans.
To accelerate decision-making, the client turned to Espalier. Leveraging its AI-powered analytics, Espalier assessed regional food waste generation across grocery retail stores, benchmarked them on sustainability priorities, and identified the most attractive partners and markets for expansion.
Espalier’s Approach
Espalier applied its industry-tailored AI platform to curate and analyze vast datasets, translating them into actionable growth insights. The engagement was structured around three core deliverables:
1. Building a comprehensive Industry Dataset:
Espalier AI scanned publicly available digital data of 120+ supermarket chains and their associated brands, covering 67,500+ store locations nationwide. Each store record included:
- Supermarket name, brand, and store type
- Geographic identifiers: region, state, county, city, zip code
- Store ID name, address, contact information and geo-coordinates
Data was sourced and cross-verified from multiple sources, including retailer websites, investor and sustainability reports, and digital media – ensuring high accuracy and completeness.
2. Demand-Supply Mapping:
Using graph analytics and advanced decision tools, Espalier analyzed millions of data points to deliver:
- Market Segmentation: Classified grocery stores by store format, operator size, and ownership structure to assess distribution footprint.
- Demand estimation: Estimated annual food waste volumes across key disposal and diversion pathways (donation, landfill, composting etc.) for all major supermarket chains and grocery stores in U.S
- Supply mapping: Identified 900+ active service providers in food waste collection, recycling, and disposal, along with their retail clients.
- Addressable market: Defined the serviceable market based on the client’s footprint, service capabilities, and competitive positioning.
3. Self-Service Digital Application:
To make insights actionable, Espalier delivered a suite of interactive tools:
- Dashboard: A filterable, drill-down interface covering 67,500+ stores, with segmentation by brand, format, and geography.
- Prioritization matrix: A scoring model ranking opportunities based on market potential, client relationships, competitive dynamics, and regional economic/regulatory factors.
- Opportunity mapping: Embedded logic to highlight high-priority grocery stores within proximity of the client’s existing service footprint enabling faster rollout and higher ROI.
Client Impact
Espalier’s structured, data-driven approach equipped the client with a clear roadmap to prioritize and win in the grocery waste segment:
- Opportunity visibility: Uncovered food waste opportunities across 67,500+ stores, representing more than 5 million tons of annual waste.
- Precision targeting: Provided a robust scoring model to prioritize supermarket brands and states—balancing market size, competition, and sustainability goals.
- Execution-ready tools: Replaced static reports with an interactive dashboard, empowering corporate development and strategy teams to make real-time, data-informed decisions.
By replacing months of manual research with AI-powered insights, Espalier delivered a data-backed roadmap that enabled the client to expand into the U.S. grocery industry with speed, precision, and confidence.
