Modern Milkman Cuts 55 Million Plastic Bottles of Waste with Peak on AWS

Modern Milkman doesn’t just use artificial intelligence (AI) to home-deliver fresh milk in glass bottles. It also live-tracks the plastic bottles saved—over 55 million and counting. Inspired by BBC’s Blue Planet, the UK-wide retailer turned to AI-driven forecasting to streamline its delivery of fresh milk, produce, and other groceries. Working with AWS Retail & Machine Learning Competency Partner Peak, Modern Milkman used Peak’s Decision Intelligence platform to analyze shelf-life information, customer orders, and supply and warehouse data. From there, Modern Milkman could make more informed predictions around inventory and demand, ensuring customers receive complete orders without substitutions.

Demands on grocery supply and home delivery dramatically increased during the pandemic. With only twelve percent of 1.85 billion plastic items recycled weekly in the UK, the mission of waste reduction at Modern Milkman resonated with many. As the company experienced exponential growth, it needed a new way to ensure the right products were in stock in its localized grocery hubs and drive greater operational excellence.

The company turned to its data to gain more insights into its supply networks and optimize its inventory planning. To achieve this, Modern Milkman teamed up with Peak, an AWS Partner with multiple AWS Competency designations. These designations validate Peak’s technical proficiency and proven customer success in retail, supply chain, and machine learning. Through its AI platform, Peak supports transformative growth for retail companies in a variety of sectors. It leverages AI and machine learning (ML) to enhance performance and agility, and drive efficiency throughout the entire retail supply chain of customers.

Peak helped Modern Milkman streamline several facets of its business operations, beginning with demand forecasting for its milk. Modern Milkman Chief Information Officer (CIO) John Hughes speaks further on this first transformative gain for the company: “The demand forecasting we’ve developed with Peak for our milk provides automation that streamlines our supply chain across the board. We’ve gained a ton of efficiency in our process while reducing a great deal of waste.”

To drive the seamless, customer-centric performance of its digital delivery platform, Peak supports Modern Milkman with AWS compute, storage, and database services. The platform also leverages the scalability, flexibility, and agility of several AWS services including Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Redshift, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Modern Milkman leveraged the Peak platform connectors to drive faster ML model development and faster data analysis through scheduled imports.

AI-driven demand forecasting enabled Modern Milkman to diligently tailor orders from its suppliers to reduce food waste. Warehouse and supply data and shelf-life information helped Modern Milkman deliver orders to customers with minimal or no substitutions. The efficiency and accuracy reduced food spoilage while customers enjoyed the tradition of receiving local farm-fresh products at their doorsteps.

Hughes elaborates, “the AI-powered technology of Peak on AWS enables us to remove over 55 million plastic bottles from the environment while delivering the freshest and most accurate orders possible for our customers."

In keeping with the tradition of accessing farm-fresh milk, eggs, and other staples from your doorstep in the morning, Modern Milkman completes the transportation and delivery of up to three orders per week—overnight—for customers. Peak helps Modern Milkman reimagine and optimize the flow of the stocking process in its hubs across the UK.

Honoring its commitment to reducing waste, Modern Milkman has not only solidified its reputation among its growing environmentally conscious customer base, but it has also attracted and maintained a high-quality workforce. Hughes elaborates, “We see many people moving across the country to work for Modern Milkman because they see a problem with plastic, or they see that we're a purpose-driven organization. Someone from France packed up his bag and moved over to work with us because he was so enamored by our mission.”

In asserting the value of Peak and AWS across its operations, Hughes expressed the company’s plan to continue the progress they’ve made. Beginning with an expansion across the UK, Modern Milkman also has plans to expand its operations to the US market. The company will leverage its AI insights to tackle an internal reduction of its CO2 emissions and much more.