Anyone who’s tried to read the ingredients of a standard loaf of white bread knows that reading labels isn’t always easy. Whether it’s trying to decipher e-numbers or remembering the 60 different names for sugar, there are a myriad of ways to get confused. Add to this marketing and dietary claims, or in many cases a lack of, and it’s easy to understand why so many online stores return such a low number of results for popular search terms such as vegan or gluten free.
In 2017, Tesco UK became our first client. An initial test at that time showed that due to a lack of adequate front-of-pack marketing claims, they were returning only 162 vegan products and 327 gluten free. With their product data cleaned and optimised, these numbers jumped up significantly to over 16000 and 24000. Without our technology they had only been able to surface 1% of all available vegan and gluten free products. While technology and e-commerce platforms have come a long way since 2017, some retailers are still very much lagging behind. A recent audit of some major supermarkets in Europe, UK and USA found that retailers had an average of 181 items missing from search results, and even more worrying, an average error rate of 45%.
Front of pack information, whilst often helpful in providing a snapshot of the nutritional values to the customer, simply doesn’t provide enough information to meet differential need states and limits what a retailer can do. Product data generally encompasses a huge amount of attributes per product. These attributes contain a number of statements, values and messages. Beyond the basics of nutritional information, you can use these attributes to power data analytics, assortment planning, targeted marketing, personalisation and key food discovery for your customers needs.
But before all this, it’s important that your product data is accurate. Product data used to be a huge concern for our clients, not anymore. We process, clean and deliver them timely product data. Spoon Guru’s AI technology (that processes 20,000 products per minute) is able to enrich product data identifying key product attributes that can be used to drive a more personalised shopping experience. We clean your data offering the highest possible accuracy that can enable an increase of up to 135% in online coverage. Our process includes Quality Assuring your data, through our nutritionist team, and our enrichment process takes account of your geographical locality, ensuring any intervention we provide is applicable to you.
We worked closely with Jet in the United States, an innovative food retailer to power their search and filter experience. By delivering them clean enriched data, we could identify products that meet customers needs across Vegan, Gluten Free and Kosher diets, a real need for Jet’s customer base. We were also able to power shop by diet areas, clearly sign-posted on Jet’s website making shopping for Gluten Free or Lactose Free simpler for customers. We were able to improve Jet’s filter accuracy by 1.8 times, increase click through rates by 3 times and recommend sales by 4.5 times against a similar competitor.
Spoon Guru worked closely with Schnucks to identify over 5,000 products, through our data enrichment process, that met a criteria for food products that were ‘Good For You’ feeding into Schnucks wider marketing campaign aimed at encouraging healthy eating on a wide scale. The campaign recognised the need to support customers more in making healthier choices. ‘Good For You’ continues to be a hugely successful campaign with its incorporation into the Shucks loyalty program, customers are rewarded for healthy eating. 20% of annual acquisition targets were achieved within the first two weeks of launch and email marketing open rates have increased significantly against previous campaigns. Clear product data has supported assortment planning, and identifying products that meet the ‘Good for You’ criteria, this is made visible to customers at the shelf-edge.
We take away the time needed to process whilst removing the complexity of managing your product data, and allow you to focus on meeting a greater level of customer needs across diets, lifestyles, allergens and sustainability. Our Product suite supports search and filter improvements, product enrichment, and we can even nudge customers to make healthier choices through our Swaps Product, offering a deeper more personalised shopping journey.
