Smart kitchen software startup Innit announced a partnership with SPINS today that will bring the company’s personalized nutrition, guided cooking and shoppable recipe technology directly to grocery retailers’ websites.
The deal comes against a backdrop of a pandemic and surging online grocery shopping. Consumers, many for the first time, are increasingly shopping for their groceries online. According to Innit CEO Kevin Brown, online grocery buying experiences can often feel like a trip back in time.
“A lot of ecommerce interfaces are 1.0,” said Brown, whom I spoke to by phone this week. “Shoppers used to be able to walk through the store and everything was nicely laid out. Now they’re searching through thousands of products.”
SPINS and Innit hope to take this old Webvan-like experience and bring it into 2020 by making shopping results more personalized and relevant.
To do so, each company brought something to the table. SPINS product data has traditionally been used by grocers and CPG brands to understand product purchasing trends. With this deal, the SPINS product metadata has been mapped to Innit’s personalized nutrition and shoppable recipe engines. These engines are now directly accessible through an API for grocery retailers to embed directly into their websites.
This deal marks the first time Innit’s personalization technology is accessible outside of its own suite of apps and available through grocer websites, but it’s far from the first time the company has shown interest in the grocery shopping. The company acquired Shopwell a few years ago, an app that allows consumers to scan barcodes and get nutrition data about products while in-store, and last year the company partnered up with Basketful to power shoppable recipes.
I expect online grocery shopping to be a trend with real staying power. In this sense, it’s good to see personalization platforms like those from Innit come directly to grocer websites to bridge the shopping part of the meal journey and the planning and cooking portion.
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