NutriNet – a personal assistant for your grocery shopping

18

October

2024

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Have you ever taken hours browsing around supermarkets searching for the most nutritious food options? Did it take you too much time figuring out which recipes to cook best, with the groceries you bought? Struggles when dealing with food are numerous, starting from choosing products with appropriate nutrients simply not knowing enough recipes.

Therefore, we introduce NutriNet – a mobile application that is going to make shopping and meal planning easier!

• Grocery shopping & meal planning simplification:

NutriNet simplifies grocery shopping and meal planning, by analyzing which products and recipes fit the users’ desired grocery item wishes, nutrition values and store preferences best. NutriNet aims to address the challenges being implicit to personalized nutrition and helps consumers make healthier food choices by simplifying the grocery shopping and meal planning process. This shall be done by eliminating the need to perfectly understand all nutrition values or to search for numerous recipes. NutriNet completes all these tasks for you in real-time and provides clear and accessible recommendations for you.

• Real-time personal assitant: NutriNet acts as a multifunctional application providing value to consumers by solving various food related problems in real-time. Appearing as a chatbot, it is aimed at taking general grocery shopping lists or meal wishes as input query, combined with preferences for food characteristics (e.g., nutrients, allergies) and grocery stores. It then provides brand specific and personalized grocery shopping lists, as well as meal recommendations, if so desired. Moreover, grocery items can also be added into the initial grocery shopping list query, by scanning them with the integrated AR tool. The product will then be detected visually and thus will be integrated into the shopping list input query.

• Long-term customer engagement: NutriNet distinguishes from competition by providing personalized and customized advice. This is possible, as NutriNet consists of a database, having incorporated stock and product information of the major supermarkets in the Netherlands. In contrast, classic applications, which try to meet similar needs (e.g., meal recommendation) rather focus on counting nutrients for the purpose of short-term weight loss, instead of personalizing grocery shopping lists and meal recommendation to enable a healthier lifestyle for users. Those applications are usable on short term but are proven to have low adherence over the time (Chen et al., 2015).

• Personalized recommendations: NutriNet leverages generative AI to offer accurately personalized recommendations. Users can simply enter their preferences, while prompting a grocery list or a meal, such as gluten-free or high in protein, and the generative AI powered application will provide accurately personalized results.
However, personalization and raising awareness for healthy foods are not the only purposes of NutriNet. It also addresses sustainability issues that supermarkets are facing. By gathering consumer purchase and search data in the application, consulting services can be offered to supermarkets, enabling them to plan ordering and stockholding processes more efficient. Hence, supermarkets should be able to reduce food waste due to overstocking on long-term.

NutriNet offers a 2-sided network platform, yielding important value to both, consumers as well as supermarkets.

Contributors

574051 – Duong Dao
728070 – David Wurzer
738898 – David Do
562387 – Roxi Ni

References

Chen, J., Berkman, W., Bardouh, M., Ng, C. Y. K., & Allman-Farinelli, M. (2019). The use of a food logging app in the naturalistic setting fails to provide accurate measurements of nutrients and poses usability challenges. Nutrition, 57, 208-216.

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Alibaba introduces “new retail” with Hema Supermarket

24

September

2018

5/5 (1)  

Different types of technologies are disrupting the grocerymarket, like “just walk out” technology and home delivery. Another disruption, called Hema, is coming from the multinational Alibaba. Hema is a supermarket that combines online and offline shopping. Every product has a barcode that provides customers with product and price information.

In 2015 the first Hema shop was introduced in Shanghai. Nowadays there are 65 shops throughout China and they are planning to open dozens of shops this year1, 2.

 

What is Hema and how is it different from other supermarkets?

Until recently, the Chinees grocery market was traditional. The customer experience was depressing, with the fluorescent lamps and frowning employees. In contrast to the traditional supermarkets, Hema is an appealing brand which creates a seamless customer shopping experience. How Hema is making a difference is for example with the Hema app; customers can shop, dine and pay their groceries by using one single device. Customers can use their smart phone to scan the barcodes and find additional information such as; product details and recipes. At the in-store restaurant, customers can pick their own fresh products which are prepared on the spot.

Besides this offline customer experience Hema offers a home-delivery service, so customers who shop online have a same great experience, as their groceries will be delivered within 30 minutes2, 3.

 

Wat kind of technology is used?

Hema is using different types of technologies to combine online and offline shopping experiences. Hema uses big data analytics that remembers all purchases of each customer and makes personalized recommendations. The app suggests a data-driven selection of fresh products based on the customer’s location. Within the Hema store digital price tags are used which provides dynamic pricing based on the competition. Another technology is used in one of the stores in China, where robots are serving customers at the in-store restaurant3.

Looking at how quickly Hema is growing and the kind of features they offer, I think that Hema will expand worldwide and be a worldwide success. In Europe and other parts of the world, we do not have this kind of shopping experience as the Chinees have with Hema. I think Alibaba earns a big market share in the grocery industry.

 

 

Sources:

  1. https://www.alizila.com/video/take-tour-hema-supermarket-experience-new-retail/
  2. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/18/alibaba-hema-stores-blend-online-and-offline-retail.html
  3. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/30/inside-hema-alibabas-new-kind-of-superstore-robots-apps-and-more.html

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How AI is Changing the Way You Do Your Groceries

23

September

2017

4/5 (1) Imagine how much time it would save you if you could just walk into the supermarket, grab the groceries you need, go your own way again. No check-out line, no need for paying on the spot, no packing from your basket into your bag. Sounds too futuristic? Such supermarkets already exist! Amazon introduced the Amazon Go supermarkets, where there are no cashiers and consumers just take the products they need and walk out (Alba, 2016). The consumers are charged through their amazon account after they leave the store (Alba, 2016).

Source: https://www.mobilegeeks.de/news/amazon-go-der-supermarkt-der-zukunft-eroeffnet-2017/
Source: https://www.mobilegeeks.de/news/amazon-go-der-supermarkt-der-zukunft-eroeffnet-2017/

It seems that more and more businesses are moving to a digitally driven environment. If you thought Amazon Go was too futuristic, you will be thunderstruck by Moby, a Japanese 24-hour grocery store with no staff, check-out register, or even fixed location (Peters, 2017). That is right, the grocery store moves itself around and even is designed to visit the warehouse to restock – all by itself (Peters, 2017).

With these technological developments, everyday supermarkets may face serious problems if they do not invest in similar practices. It is too big of a step to implement all the artificial intelligence and machine learning systems Amazon has installed in their Amazon Go shops at once. However, supermarkets are starting to introduce more and more digital driven practices in their environment. An example of a supermarket that started doing so is Albert Heijn, a Dutch supermarket chain that exists for over a century already. They already have a website and mobile application where consumers can, among other things, order products and receive personal discounts, based on their prior buying behavior (Albert Heijn, 2017). They were also the first in The Netherlands to introduce digital shopping lists, meaning consumers can save either spoken or written messages to the list – which has the form of a fridge magnet – or scan barcodes of products, which would then appear on their shopping list in the Albert Heijn App (ESM, 2017).

appie-juni-2017-startscherm-oudnieuw
Albert Heijn App. Source: https://www.iculture.nl/nieuws/vernieuwde-appie-app-albert-heijn-juni-2017/

The above examples are excellent illustrations that artificial intelligence and machine learning are not just fancy technologies used in fancy businesses. They also illustrate that if everyday grocery stores choose to complete disregard these developments, they might end up in big trouble. The ‘new way of grocery shopping’ is much more efficient and time-saving.

No worries – unless you really enjoy spending time in the grocery store, then do worry – better times are coming. Maybe in a few years we will be visited by the grocery stores themselves, instead of the other way around. What do you think?

 

 

 

Sources:

ESM (2017). Albert Heijn Trials Hiku Smart Shopping Gadget. Accessed online through: https://www.esmmagazine.com/albert-heijn-trials-smart-shopping-list-gadget-hiku/41736

Alba, D. (2016). Only Amazon Could Make a Checkout-Free Grocery Store a Reality. Accessed online through: https://www.wired.com/2016/12/amazon-go-grocery-store/

Albert Heijn (2017). Appie App: Alles over de vernieuwede Appie App. Accessed online through: https://www.ah.nl/appie-app

Peters, A. (2017). The Grocery Store Of The Future Is Mobile, Self-Driving, and Run By AI. Accessed online through: https://www.fastcompany.com/40429419/this-tiny-grocery-store-is-mobile-self-driving-and-run-by-ai.

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