Automating Substitutions Without Losing the Customer’s Choice

A grocery substitution workflow seems simple until the product is fresh food. A sealed bag of flour may be interchangeable(*). A particular avocado, steak, peach, fish fillet, or bakery loaf may represent a deliberate human judgment.

That means the automation needs more than product matching.

A practical workflow could combine:

Product-level fungibility defaults
Customer substitution preferences
Package and expiration checks
Computer-vision evidence
Weight and shelf-location data
Employee confirmation when confidence is low

Here are proposed decision thresholds that allow automatic substitution for highly fungible products, conditional checks for middle cases, and exact-item preservation for low-fungibility foods.

This is an example where automation boundaries matter. The routine cases can move quickly. The exceptions deserve evidence and human review.

Where would you place the approval step in a grocery fulfillment workflow?

https://creativecooking.blogspot.com/2026/07/tech-tuesday-fungible-food.html

(*) A sealed bag of flour may NOT be interchangeable depending on the purpose, the chef, etc. Just roll with it please, it's an example!

#Automation #AI #ProcessEngineering

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Automating Substitutions Without Losing the Customer’s Choice