Food Forum: If You Build It, They Will Come

Personalized Shopping Experience For A Social Marketplace. By Taryn Fixel Planning brunch for a few friends used to be simple: you’d whip up a cheese soufflé and shake up your signature cocktails.  Gone are the old days.  Today, everyone has a food allergy, a food philosophy, and a list of Sorry, I Don't Do… cilantro, meat, sugar, etc... An individual’s daily food choices are determined by innumerable, and often intangible, emotional, cultural, and dietary needs. Our grocery stores have grown to attempt to accommodate this dizzying range of tastes and requirements. As retailers increased their variety from 9,000 items in 1974 to over 40,000 today, they implemented complex inventory and management systems that don’t take into account how to share relevant information with consumers. Retailers have not yet seized upon technology to help customers navigate the diversity of products nor implemented broad-scale feedback systems that would allow them to calibrate inventory to customer preferences. With such volume and variety, how do shoppers come to learn of products, where to buy them, and whether to trust that they’ll like something new?   Grocery shopping has become a complex multivariable calculus.  Shoppers spend an average of 35-40 minutes in the store, allowing 1 minute for every thousand available products. Considering that each package has over 100 potential selling points or deal breakers to review, a new picture of chaos emerges: customers are drowning in disparate details (NonGMO, Gluten Free, Antibiotic Free...) and no simple way to compare products. As relationships between buyers and sellers evolved, producers inherited the responsibility to instill confidence in their products through packaging or product placement.  Food packaging became a proxy for the producer, including images of the manufacturer and testimonials from satisfied customers. More information was added when the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act was introduced in 1990, providing greater transparency with ingredients and nutritional facts.  As food consciousness grew, regulatory stamps proliferated and packaging became increasingly crowded. Today, even the savviest shoppers experience confusion when interpreting these claims, and cannot mentally collate all of this food data. Information that may make products appealing has, in fact, caused gridlock that cannot be solved with a “Gluten Free” sign in the aisle. Overwhelmed by choice, consumers are instead deterred from trying products that could increase their spending and basket size. In this climate of chaos, two primary barriers deter customers from purchasing new items in a store, beyond cost: assurance of the food’s taste and awareness of its existence. Awareness Connecting the web presence of brands and retailers in an interactive social community where shoppers can discover, endorse, and learn where to buy products would improve shoppers’ experience. 65% of shoppers report planning for grocery shopping online.  They click back and forth between fragmented sources with incomplete information. They move from diet specific food blogs with product reviews to brand websites, seeking ingredients and flavors they prefer. Potential customers then have to figure out which products are sold where. Unfortunately, manufacturer websites are often a dead-end, as the limited data customers can access is rarely up to date. Compounding the difficulty, shoppers are required to perform this inefficient process for each product they have an interest in purchasing. Optimizing these information channels is a major opportunity for brands and retailers that would also provide a direct avenue for understanding real time demographic trends. Assurance Consumer confidence in products is established through personal recommendations and education.  38% of female shoppers cite recommendations from friends or family as the most important factor in making a purchasing decision. Though consumers are accustomed to sharing specs about a favorite restaurant or recipe through social media, it is less typical to share information about a grocery store product.  Most of the time, a consumer excited about a new find will simply snap a photo and send it to a friend they think might be interested. This is effective in real-time information sharing between two people, but scaling this one event has the power to blossom into a treasure trove of consumer data. Technology can tap the power of this information by creating a social marketplace that would benefit brands by:

Ingredient1 enables shoppers to personalize grocery shopping for their tastes, needs, and mood, saving them time examining labels while seamlessly providing recommendations that can be shared between friends.  Our first consumer product, a mobile app, puts the store in consumers pockets and shoppers minds in the store. To create this platform, we are consolidating food information and capturing every variable that a person potentially uses to make a purchasing decision – texture, flavor, ingredients, and dietary needs - while connecting each individual product to specific store locations. This in turn allows retailers to use customer analytics to improve the customer shopping experience and provide more of what their customers want, while safeguarding against financial and environmental waste. Consumer psychologist Brian Wansink estimates we make over 200 food choices every day.  With smart apps, we can encapsulate those decisions and allow brands, retailers, and shoppers to improve their bottom line.  In doing so, we’ll provide more of what people want, spend less to do it, and remove the mental friction so people can just enjoy brunch with friends. Taryn Fixel is founder of Ingredient1. She can be reached at [email protected].