Innit, a startup that makes software to digitize the consumer meal journey, announced today it has teamed up with Google Cloud to offer a new software module to food retailers to enable personalized healthy eating recommendations to their online grocer customers.
The new offering, which will be available to customers of Google Cloud via the Google Cloud Marketplace, enables grocers and other companies to create personalized nutrition recommendations for customers with health conditions such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and heart disease.
According to the announcement, the module utilizes an algorithm that scores various meal plans based on the shopper’s needs and then offers recommendations for personalized nutrition to consumers looking to optimize for a variety of health concerns. The module also provides assistance with cooking and meal planning.
According to Innit CEO Kevin Brown, the company increased its focus on health and wellness over the past year. They developed an app for Roche, one of Europe’s largest pharmaceutical companies, to help those with type 2 diabetes better manage their eating and meal planning.
“The Roche project allowed us to sharpen up a lot of the diet and health and science focus,” Brown said in a phone interview with The Spoon. “We worked with our science committee, worked with the doctors of the customer to put together a really good program that provides daily guidance to people that are struggling.”
After the Roche project, Innit saw it could take much of what it built and offer it to a variety of customers through its partnership with Google Cloud.
“We saw that there was kind of a big unsolved problem for actionable healthy eating,” Brown said. “So now we’re packaging that up together with Google and bringing that to all of the grocery retailers, as well as healthcare companies.”
The new offering expands on Innit’s relationship with Google, which got its start in 2018 with the addition of Innit functionality to their Google Home product. Google Cloud first offered Innit’s technology for personalized food recommendations through the Cloud Marketplace last year, and this latest offering gives food retailers and others the ability to add focused personalized nutrition plans for specific health conditions.
Innit has come a long way since the company’s early focus on developing guided cooking and smart appliance software for kitchen appliance manufacturers. The company’s acquisition of Shopwell in early 2017 kickstarted Innit’s move into shoppable recipes and personalized food data, and today the company describes itself as a personalized nutrition platform company. In many ways, this move by Innit is indicative of the broader move by smart kitchen software players to beef up their food commerce and personalized health offerings over the past few years.
When I asked Brown if Innit is still talking to appliance manufacturers about building solutions for their products, he told me that while these companies did slow down their digitization initiatives over the past few years as a result of supply chain and manufacturing difficulties related to COVID, conversations have begun to heat up again.
“There definitely was some industry slowdown, but we’re seeing it wake up again,” Brown said. “I’ve had multiple calls and new customer discussions with appliance manufacturers and so things are starting to wake back up.”
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