RangeMe introduces AI summaries to speed up retail product discovery amid rising new SKUs

RangeMe enhances its platform with artificial intelligence to streamline buyer review processes and better handle the surge of new food and CPG products, aiming to accelerate connections between brands and retailers.

Retail and foodservice buyers face a daunting discovery problem: with roughly 30,000 new food and CPG items introduced each year, finding the handful that fit a specific assortment need can be an overwhelming manual task. RangeMe, the business-to-business p...

roduct discovery platform used by thousands of retailers and brands, is applying artificial intelligence to compress that workload and surface the most promising submissions more rapidly.

RangeMe’s Immediate Opportunities are time-limited sourcing campaigns created by buyers to target particular needs , for example, fresh innovations to refresh a shelf, private-label manufacturers, or products meeting sustainability criteria. Suppliers with RangeMe Starter, Premium or Pro subscriptions can submit product entries and respond to bespoke questions within a defined window, typically around two weeks, for direct consideration by participating retailers. According to RangeMe’s site, these campaigns allow retailers to gather focused applications without penalising suppliers’ annual submission limits.

Even when campaigns narrow the field, however, buyers frequently still contend with hundreds or thousands of eligible entries. To address that bottleneck, RangeMe has built AI-driven summaries that synthesise a brand’s profile, product specifications and application responses into compact, actionable briefs. The automated blurbs call out a product’s distinguishing attributes, list the most relevant review points for the buyer, and can be tailored to emphasise the specific three or four application questions a buyer deems most important.

“We want to make it as efficient for them as possible to really understand each brand and each product very quickly,” said Mike Kohn, Head of Product at RangeMe, in the company blog post announcing the feature. Kohn added an efficiency claim echoed across buyers on the platform: “Anecdotally, we have heard from buyers that it can save them 90% of their time while they’re going through this review process because it efficiently summarizes all the different disparate pieces of information all in one place.”

RangeMe positions the technology as an acceleration tool rather than a substitute for human judgement. Buyers retain full access to every submission for deeper inspection; the AI is intended to provide a rapid first-pass signal so high-quality brands do not disappear in the volume. Industry-facing materials from RangeMe also highlight the platform’s broader reach , the company says it serves more than 15,000 retail buyers and roughly 200,000 suppliers , and packages such as saved searches, advanced filters and direct messaging that support the sourcing workflow.

Beyond summarisation, RangeMe’s roadmap contemplates several AI extensions. Upcoming initiatives mentioned by the company include automated trend discovery driven by platform activity, guided assistance to help suppliers complete stronger submissions, and tools to support category management and wider discovery tasks for buying teams. Those developments aim to shift the platform from a product bulletin board to an intelligence layer that helps buyers and suppliers spot opportunities and gaps more proactively.

For suppliers, RangeMe’s help centre materials stress best practices for engaging buyers on the platform , concise, relevant communication through the platform’s messaging and careful sample handling , and remind users that communications must flow through RangeMe rather than external channels. The Immediate Opportunities documentation also outlines submission handling and status tracking so suppliers understand timing and visibility within each campaign.

As retailers continue to confront expanding product churn and increasingly granular assortment demands, RangeMe’s blend of curated campaigns and AI summarisation seeks to reduce friction in discovery. The company frames the work as making connections between inventive brands and retail buyers more quickly and with greater confidence, while retaining buyer oversight for final decisions.

Source: Noah Wire Services