AI start-up partners with retailers: Spoon Guru technology allows for “frictionless” online grocery shopping

21 Jun 2019 --- Ground-breaking AI-led technology that provides a unique dietary platform to help shoppers quickly and easily find suitable foods when shopping online is being rolled out to retailers around the world. Following a successful collaboration with Tesco in the UK, start-up Spoon Guru is partnering with several market-leading supermarkets in the US, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, to integrate the technology solution into their digital shopping platforms.

With an increasing number of consumers struggling to manage diets due to health, lifestyle, religious or ethical reasons, there is a fast-growing demand for more personalized grocery shopping capabilities, particularly in the case of allergies. When shopping online for groceries with any of Spoon Guru’s new international partners, consumers will be able to filter their food searches to include specific dietary attributes. This can range from allergies and intolerances, including milk or tree nuts, to individual dietary requirements, such as vegan or vegetarian, as well as healthy choices such as low saturated fat or high fiber.

The technology “takes the hassle out of finding the right food” by transforming how consumers search and discover foods suitable for their individual needs, explains Markus Stripf, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of UK-based Spoon Guru.

The use of technology like this is being touted as key to solving the shortcomings surrounding food labeling transparency. Spoon Guru, which launched as an app in 2016, developed the AI technology into a patented software, which uses machine learning, nutritional information and labeling information.

“There is huge consumer demand for more accuracy and relevance as most of us now have some form of dietary requirements or health objective, and people want frictionless shopping. The majority of us now follows some sort of exclusion diet,” he tells FoodIngredientsFirst. “We support an array of health, wellbeing and lifestyle diets, delivering a tailored shopping experience to each individual customer and helping shoppers make healthier choices.”

“Many consumers now actively have to exclude certain foodstuffs from their diet, which means the food industry is under mounting pressure to meet growing demand for more accuracy, relevancy and choice. Spoon Guru relieves this pressure by allowing retailers to do so effortlessly,” he explains.

The UK-based start-up is collaborating with Albert Heijn in the Netherlands, Woolworths in Australia and Jet.com in the US. 

The demand for a more personalized approach to food shopping is clear, says Stripf. “I can either apply one of many dietary and lifestyle filters to search results, or I can search for specific items like gluten-free cake, vegan lasagne or low-sugar desserts, safe in the knowledge that all search results returned are accurate and relevant,” he adds.

“The frustration, confusion and lack of choice consumers have had to endure for so long is no longer necessary, let alone acceptable. People want to know what they put into their bodies for a number of reasons. The innovative AI-based technology, the Spoon Guru TAGS platform, is now available to empower retailers around the world enabling them to respond to ever-growing consumer demand for more accuracy, transparency, relevance and choice.”

Spoon Guru allows high-level personalization for shoppers by optimizing, enhancing and augmenting product catalogs with dietary tags. Spoon Guru's proprietary TAGs technology determines the true suitability of products. TAGs utilizes a combination of AI, algorithms and human expertise to make products accessible, searchable and discoverable. 

Following the success of its ongoing partnership with Tesco, this expansion into new international territories marks the start of a new chapter for Spoon Guru, and an important development for the grocery sector. 

Tesco’s basket conversion rate has seen big increases since the search and filter technology was introduced, with some search terms seeing up to a 500 percent increase in conversion, according to Stripf.

“There has been a significant improvement in the Tesco shopping experience. For example, before Spoon Guru reindexed Tesco’s online grocery catalog, consumers could only find 162 vegan products. Now they can find 16,000. Before Spoon Guru, they could barely find 327 gluten-free products. Now they can find 24,000. We serve millions of customers live in-market, processing billions of data points every day, and have had zero errors raised,” he says.

“Spoon Guru is demonstrating how new technologies like AI and machine learning can have a huge benefit to large corporations around the world trying to cater for increasingly complex consumer preferences and requirements.”

He notes that unstructured data is one of the reasons why there is not enough transparency – or at least easy-to-access transparency that consumers can rely upon. With the advances in AI and machine learning, they can now crunch huge datasets to make sense of unstructured data.

“For example, we crunch more than 14 billion data points every night, just to work out the dietary profile of individual food products and recipes so that they can more easily be matched to consumers' individual requirements, tastes and needs,” he concludes.

By Gaynor Selby