Dec 3, 2018, a consumer from Shanghai complained on weibo.com after she bought two expired bottles of coconut milk, and this is actually the second time for Freshhema to be exposed to sell expired goods, within only one month. Besides the high-speed development of opening stores, Freshhema really needs to pay more attention to the management and should consider with more data-driven methods.
Shanghai, Dec 7, 2018 /EqualOcean/ - “I can’t believe that I bought foods which have expired for two months in Freshhema Jinqiao Store, is the management of Freshhema really good?” Miss HU, a consumer from Shanghai, complained on weibo.com after she bought two expired bottles of coconut milk. The complaint was posted on Dec 3, and the consumption was on Dec 1.
This is actually the second time for Freshhema to be exposed to sell expired goods, within only one month. The last time incident was on Nov 15, that Freshhema’s staff was caught replacing the expired vegetables' labels with new ones with the current date.
According to The Paper’s news released on Dec 6, Freshhema officially admitted the fault and offered a ten-times compensation to consumer, and gave out the internal investigation result by reply to Miss HU’s post on Weibo, “We recovered a number of stolen goods on November 27, and it is the first time we encountered such a situation. The lack of experiences then resulted in the resale of the goods without following the standard process of quality control.” However, Miss HU wasn’t satisfied with the response, refused to accept the compensation and reported this issue to CFDA, the authority then initiated an investment.
Freshhema, the Alibaba-owned online-to-offline supermarket chain, was founded in 2016, and the company successfully opened its 100 store in Wuhan on Nov 30, 2018, and at which time, the company has not been in business for even 2 years.
Apparently, the two-times mistakes regarding products management highlighted Freshhema’s weakness in the management of commodities as well as employees. In order to provide great user experiences besides the high-speed development with support from Alibaba, Freshhema does need to pay more attention to the store management, better and stricter regulations are needed.
Furthermore, besides better regulation, this kind of issues could also be solved by better management driven by data. If every product is recognized and checked by computers rather than human beings, the error rate would be lower. China’s new retail, Freshhema as a symbol indeed, paid quite a lot attention and invested a lot to the data-driven management of delivering goods to consumers in time, promotions, as well as the supply chain management, the in-store management seems to need to be updated asap.