• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Skip to navigation
Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

  • Home
  • Podcasts
  • Events
  • Newsletter
  • Connect
    • Custom Events
    • Slack
    • RSS
    • Send us a Tip
  • Advertise
  • Consulting
  • About
The Spoon
  • Home
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletter
  • Events
  • Advertise
  • About

Halla Raises $1.4M Seed Round, Pivots to Focus on AI-Powered Grocery Recommendations

by Chris Albrecht
May 15, 2019May 15, 2019Filed under:
  • Funding
  • Future of Grocery
  • Robotics, AI & Data
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)

Halla, a startup that uses machine learning and AI to power food recommendations for grocery shoppers, announced today that it has raised a $1.4 million seed round led by E&A Venture Capital with participation from SOSV. This brings the total amount of money Halla has raised to $1.9 million.

Halla has a B2B platform dubbed Halla I/O that helps recommend relevant food products to shoppers. As we wrote at the time of Halla’s launch last year, the “company created an entirely new model and a new taxonomy that doesn’t just look at what a food item is, but also the molecules that make it up, a map of attributes linked to other food as well as how people interact with that food.”

So if you are using a grocer’s app with Halla I/O built in, the app will serve up intelligent recommendations as you continue to shop online. Buy salt, it could recommend pepper. By salt and noodles and beef, and it might guess that you are making a bolognese and recommend tomato sauce.

If you read our coverage of Halla last year, you’d notice something different about the company now. Initially, its go-to market strategy included both grocery stores and restaurants. But in the ensuing year, Halla has abandoned its pitch to restaurants, choosing instead to focus exclusively on grocery retail.

“What we’ve found is that the market timing was screaming ‘where tech meets grocery,'” Halla Co-Founder and CEO Spencer Price told me by phone recently, “The restaurant space is more crowded for building recommendations.”

But all that work in the restaurant space didn’t go to waste. “The truth is we were able to keep all of our learnings from restaurant and made our grocery recommendations stronger,” Price said. “One core learning is that restaurant dishes and menu items, as long as they have descriptions, are just recipes without instructions.”

Halla now has more than 100,000 grocery items and one hundred million unique grocery transactions from retailers across the country in its data set, informing its machine learning algorithms. Price is quick to point out that Halla does not have any personally identifiable information on people. “We can make recommendations to customer X without knowing who customer X is,” Price said

Though a grocery chain can move a lot of product and provide a lot of data for better purchasing recommendations, grocery chains as a whole do not move quickly. To get them to adopt a new technology is like turning a battleship — they need a lot of time to execute. “They’re not looking for speed,” Price said, “but a reliable solution.”

To this end, the biggest thing Halla’s funding buys them is time. “We’ve bought some runway,” said Price. The company now has some breathing room to take its time and conduct even more tests with slow-moving retailers. Halla is in tests with unnamed grocers right now, and offers its recommendation on an API pay-per-call model.

AI-based B2B food recommendation is almost its own mini-industry. Spoonshot, Analytical Flavor Systems, and Tastewise all use vast data sets to make product predictions and recommendations to restaurants and CPG companies. Other companies like AWM Smart Shelf are using a combination of prediction and smart digital signage to make in-store grocery purchase recommendations.

With online grocery shopping reaching a tipping point, people buying food via apps adding one or two more items to their cart because of intelligent recommendations could mean a nice sales boost for the grocery industry.


Related

Get the Spoon in your inbox

Just enter your email and we’ll take care of the rest:

Find us on some of these other platforms:

  • Apple Podcasts
  • Spotify
Tagged:
  • AI
  • grocery
  • Halla
  • Halla I/O
  • machine learning

Post navigation

Previous Post Newsletter: Real News About Fake Meat, Oatly and what is Chokkino?
Next Post American Express Acquires Restaurant Tech Platform Resy

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Get The Spoon in Your Inbox

The Spoon Podcast Network!

Feed your mind! Subscribe to one of our podcasts!

Tasting Cultivated Seafood in London’s East-end
After Leaving Starbucks, Mesh Gelman Swore Off The Coffee Biz. Now He Wants To Reinvent Cold Brew Coffee
Brian Canlis on Leaving an Iconic Restaurant Behind to Start Over in Nashville With Will Guidara
Food Waste Gadgets Can’t Get VC Love, But Kickstarter Backers Are All In
Report: Restaurant Tech Funding Drops to $1.3B in 2024, But AI & Automation Provide Glimmer of Hope

Footer

  • About
  • Sponsor the Spoon
  • The Spoon Events
  • Spoon Plus

© 2016–2025 The Spoon. All rights reserved.

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.