Jet.com Taps Spoon Guru as Digital Dietary Adviser

Walmart’s Jet.com subsidiary is teaming up with London-based technology company Spoon Guru to provide easy-to-find dietary preference information for consumers with specific requirements.

The deal with Jet.com marks a first-time alliance with an online American grocery retailer for the food search and discovery startup, whose search engine caters to individuals with multiple or complex search requirements via its proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning platform.

Spoon Guru’s back-end solution will ensure Jet.com shoppers will quickly and easily find suitable foods when shopping on the site, which is geared to offering city consumers a tailored experience and unique assortment across key categories of grocery, home, fashion, beauty and electronics.

With 64% of the world’s population on some form of an exclusion diet, be it an allergy, intolerance or health and lifestyle choices, “The demand for a more personalized approach to food shopping is clear,” said Markus Stripf, Spoon Guru’s co-founder and co-CEO. “With today’s technological advancements, customers especially in the U.S. are looking for a more tailored shopping experience, as well as an easy and safe solution for finding the right food.” 

Jet.com’s addition of Spoon Guru’s personalized nutritional expertise to help shoppers determine every product or recipe’s suitability for each individual shopper dovetails with a larger ongoing initiative underway at the e-tailer to develop front-end taxonomy to prioritize personalization.

Photograph courtesy of Spoon Guru

A blog post in early February by senior software engineer Nikita Sharma discussed how Jet.com believes “that personalized shopping is the future of e-commerce. The introduction of front-end taxonomy was an important step in achieving this larger goal of personalization-based product discovery. We intend to continue improving front-end taxonomy tooling and capabilities and finding new and innovative ways for tackling discoverability.”

There’s no disagreement with Stripf, who echoes the clear and present demand for a more personalized grocery shopping experience in tandem with more consumers opting to follow specific lifestyle diets for health reasons or personal choices. When shopping on Jet.com, he explained, customers will be able to filter their food searches to include specific dietary attributes from allergies and intolerances such as milk or tree nuts, individual dietary requirements such as vegan or vegetarian, and healthy choices such as low saturated fat or high fiber.

Hailing the Hoboken, N.J.-based online retailer as “a truly forward-thinking brand that puts its customers and their individual preferences at the heart of every shopping experience,” Stripf is pumped about the prospects and the ability “to help transform the consumer experience for their shoppers.”

Check out how Spoon Guru’s AI technology works on Jet.com here.