Marks & Spencer completed deployment of RELEX machine learning across its entire food supply chain by March 2025 (RetailNews.ai), after beginning implementation in March 2021 across 1,050 stores and 13 distribution centres in the UK and Ireland. The rollout covered chilled products, ambient grocery, frozen food, loose produce, internal bakery, and café ingredients—each requiring different forecasting and replenishment logic. M&S launched nearly 1,500 new food products during its 2025/26 financial year (RetailNews.ai), creating forecasting challenges for products with no historical demand data, such as the strawberry sando that sold one million units in four weeks after going viral.
The implementation revealed that technology alone does not drive transformation—organizational change does. M&S initially underestimated the degree of change required, as experienced supply chain employees had to learn new systems and ways of working. Rather than removing human judgment, automation freed planners to spend more time on strategic conversations with product and innovation teams before launches reach stores. M&S also treated waste as a key KPI, balancing availability, freshness, and waste reduction in fresh food categories. The retailer is now in an optimization phase and exploring RELEX Cortex to coordinate information across multiple systems—forecasting, allocation, space, range, and display planning (RetailNews.ai).
Beyond software, M&S is investing £340 million in an automated food distribution centre in Northamptonshire, scheduled to open in 2029 (RetailNews.ai), demonstrating that physical supply chain modernization and computational intelligence must advance together. For fresh retail, where forecasting errors become empty shelves or waste within days, the distinction between removing people from decisions and redirecting their effort toward exceptions, relationships, and commercial decisions that algorithms cannot resolve remains critical.