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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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The Relish Stock Tracker Helps You Locate Hard to Find Grocery Items

The Spoon’s North Star during this time of pandemic has been ‘how can we be of use?’ Well, you’d be hard-pressed to find something more useful for a nation desperately searching for toilet paper and bread flour than the Relish Stock Checker.

Launched today by Relish, an online meal planning and grocery shopping tool owned by Fexy Media, the Relish Stock Checker is a free tool to help you locate 50 of the hardest-to-find grocery staples (think: paper towels, pasta, sugar, canned beans, etc.) at nearby Targets and Walmarts. Just enter your zip code and the Relish Stock Checker will help you see which store locations in your area have these items in stock.

While stores are returning to normal after a bout of pandemic-induced panic shopping, there are still empty shelves for many of the staples people need to stock up on. In a time when actually going to a grocery store can potentially expose you to others with COVID-19, knowing ahead of time if a store has the item you need can help reduce risk by cutting wasted trips.

We don’t know how up-to-date the Relish Stock Checker is (Relish is tied into Walmart and Target’s APIs because of its shoppable recipes). Even Walmart and Target’s websites can be out of date by the time you actually get to the store. But at least Relish is providing some indication of available stock, and lets you aggregate results from both Walmart and Target without having to go to their sites individually.

The other bummer, if we can even call it that in these crazy times, is that Relish Stock Checker only works with Target and Walmart. In the press announcement, the company says that it will be adding more locations and grocery items in the coming weeks. There will even be a module where shoppers can submit suggestions for items they want to find.

Once the company does that, the Relish Stock Checker will be even more useful.

Just in Time for Sheltering in Place, Anycart Launches its Shoppable Recipe Service

One of my wife’s greatest talents during this time of sheltering in place is her ability to make actual meals from whatever we have in the pantry. This may sound mundane, but given the state of the world, our pantry is stocked with lots of dry and canned goods at the moment and last minute one-off trips to the grocery store aren’t in the cards.

If you’re stuck in a similar situation, you may want to check out Anycart, a new online shoppable recipe service that launched in the U.S. over this past weekend.

Instead of shopping for individual food items, Anycart lets you shop for meals that appeal to you and your family. Those include Easy Chicken Swimming Rama, Chicken Thighs with Hummus and Cucumbers, and Homemade Easy Mac and Cheese. Select the meal you want and all the ingredients for it are sent to a participating grocery store near you (Safeway, Albertsons, etc.) for fulfillment and delivery or pickup.

This is where meal shopping in the age of COVID-19 is a double-edged sword. More of us are shopping for groceries online more than ever, but that also means grocers can be overloaded, especially for delivery. Case in point: I tested Anycart this morning, picking meals and designating a Safeway as the fulfillment location. Anycart said my order would be delivered sometime between today and Saturday (with some caveats to get them out of fulling committing to that time). However, a quick check on Safeway (and personal experience with my local store) shows it doesn’t have any delivery times available until after Saturday, April 5. The only pickup option for me was an hour away .

This is partially a quirk of the more rural area where I live , but delivery delays are probably not uncommon as online grocery orders surge in this time of staying at home. Part of the appeal and promise of shoppable recipes is that you can be inspired by a new type of cuisine and then act on it. But if there is a huge delay between inspiration and action, then the shoppable recipe loses some of its lustre. That Caprese Grain Bowl with Avocado might sound good on Monday, but if you can’t make it until Saturday, you palate might have moved on.

The whole shoppable recipe space was pretty hot a couple years back with Fexy Media and Myxx providing similar offerings, and BuzzFeed’s Tasty partnered with Walmart for shoppable recipes last year. But it’s not a space that we hear a lot about or see a lot of action. Perhaps if the grocery e-commerce boom we are currently in sustains beyond this time of sheltering in place, shoppable recipes will become more central to the e-commerce experience. Who knows, even my wife may start using them.

Updated: Instacart Announces (More) New Gig Worker Protection Measures, But Strike Still On

Instacart announced new work and safety measures for its gig workforce, also known as Instacart shoppers. The announcement comes on the eve of what could be a nationwide strike of its Shoppers, who are protesting conditions they are working under during this coronavirus outbreak.

The nationwide strike was called for last week by Vanessa Bain, an Instacart Shopper in response to what she said was a lack of safety precautions the company was providing, a lack of hazard pay for the Shoppers (who are braving public interactions during this time of shelter-in-place), as well as pay for workers afflicted with or isolated by COVID-19.

On Friday, Instacart announced a number of new initiatives for its Shoppers, most of which addressed issues around pay, but did not address concerns around hygiene and physical safety. Bain, however, was not swayed by Instacart’s new moves and still called for the nationwide to happen tomorrow, Monday, March 30.

Today, Instacart announced even more new measures for its gig workers, including addressing issues around safety. Instacart, for instance, is getting into the hand sanitizer business, writing:

…Instacart worked with a third-party to manufacture its own hand sanitizer for Instacart shoppers to overcome the existing inventory delays and global supply chain scarcity, without taking away resources from healthcare workers. The product is a liquid spray ethyl alcohol-based hand sanitizer, which will ship in the next week. The independently-developed hand sanitizer that Instacart is providing meets CDC guidance for alcohol-based hand sanitizer and can be used when soap and water are not readily available.

Instacart is also revising its tip policy:

Beginning today, all existing customers’ completed orders will now default to the customer’s last tip amount, instead of the previous 5% tip default setting. The new customer tip default feature leverages order recollection technology, which remembers a customer’s previous tip and automatically sets it as their new default tip for all future orders. For example, if a customer tips 15% to their shopper for great service, their next Instacart order will automatically default to a 15% tip as well, versus defaulting back to the previous 5% default tip. Instacart is also removing the “none” option in the customer tip settings, requiring customers to manually change their tip to $0 if desired and making it less likely that a customer will remove the shopper tip altogether. Additionally, if a customer lowers the tip below 5%, the default will reset to 5% to ensure shoppers continue to have a baseline tip amount. 

Will these new steps be enough? We reached out to Bain to see if Instacart’s moves will be enough to avert the strike. With grocery delivery thrust into the spotlight and suddenly more important than ever, it’s in everyone’s best interests (Instacart, it’s gig workers on the front lines of this pandemic, and customers) to keep things rolling.

UPDATE: In a Medium post, Bain has called these new measure “a sick joke” and says that the strike is still on.

We will be following this developing story.

UPDATED: Instacart Launches New Benefits as its Gig Workers Planned to Strike

Update: This post has been updated with a statement sent to the Spoon by Vanessa Bain.

Grocery delivery startup Instacart today announced a number of new benefits for its Shoppers (the gig workers who actually go into the stores and deliver food). The new benefits come as Instacart shoppers were planning a nationwide strike this coming Monday, March 30, as first reported by Vice’s Motherboard.

The proposed strike was called in response to what was being called Instacart’s insufficient response to the dangers its Shoppers face during this COVID-19 epidemic. Vanessa Bain, an Instacart Shopper who has spearheaded previous gig worker stoppages at Instacart over its pay structure, laid out demands in a post on Medium:

On Monday, March 30, Shoppers will walk off of our jobs, and will not return to work until our demands are met. We demand that Instacart meet the following conditions:

  1. Safety precautions at no cost to workers — PPE (at minimum hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes/sprays and soap).
  2. Hazard pay — an extra $5 per order and defaulting the in-app tip amount to at least 10% of the order total.
  3. An extension and expansion of pay for workers impacted by COVID-19 — anyone who has a doctor’s note for either a preexisting condition that’s a known risk factor or requiring a self-quarantine.
  4. The deadline to qualify for these benefits must be extended beyond April 8th.

As Bain rightly points out, gig workers are on the front lines of this pandemic, venturing into public grocery stores on behalf of others, and making deliveries to strangers’ front doors. They are putting themselves at risk so people like you and me don’t have to venture out.

In a corporate blog post today, Instacart launched a number of new measures and benefits it was adding to help its Shoppers, including:

  • Extending pay for those unable to work because they are stuck with COVID-19 or placed in isolation or quarantine because of the disease
  • Additional bonuses for Shoppers ranging from $25 to $200
  • Additional pay boosts through batch promotions
  • Contactless alcohol delivery

Instacart also provided this statement via email to The Spoon:

“The health and safety of our entire community — shoppers, customers, and employees — is our first priority. Our goal is to offer a safe and flexible earnings opportunity to shoppers, while also proactively taking the appropriate precautionary measures to operate safely. We want to underscore that we absolutely respect the rights of shoppers to provide us feedback and voice their concerns. It’s a valuable way for us to continuously make improvements to the shopper experience and we’re committed to supporting this important community during this critical time.”

Will Instacart’s new moves be enough to ward off the strike? We reached out to Bain on Twitter, and will update this post as soon as we hear back. UPDATE: Bain sent us the following response:

Instacart’s response lacks any real substance. While I am glad they agreed to our fourth demand to extend the eligibility period for COVID-19 pay, they’ve provided no meaningful concessions to our demands in full. It’s far too little too late. We are still calling for an emergency walk off/work stoppage until our demands are met in full.

Instacart is busier than ever, thanks to people sheltering in place and social distancing, and to better accommodate its surge in demand, the company is looking to bring on an additional 300,000 shoppers in the coming months.

With unemployment spiking amid business closures, a lot of people will be looking to Instacart for some kind of steady paycheck. Ensuring that its growing workforce is fully prepared to face the challenges of this outbreak seems not only reasonable, but the morally correct thing to do. On a more personal note, I literally just got my parents to start using Instacart, and I’m sure they aren’t the only elderly (read: more at risk) people who are doing so. So here’s hoping Instacart and its Shoppers can iron all this out and truly be a force for good in these trying times.

Grocery Chains Hy-Vee, Woodman’s and More to Offer Free Delivery for the Elderly

The ability for folks over the age of 60 to get groceries is a big concern during this pandemic. Stores are creating special shopping hours for the elderly, I’m Instacarting my septuagenarian parents, and starting today, more than 2,000 grocery store locations across the country will offer free grocery delivery for those over 60 years old.

According to a press release emailed to us this morning, Hy-Vee, Woodmans, Kowalski’s Markets and “hundreds of independent grocers” such as Piggly Wiggly, LifeThyme Natural Market, Le District and Matherne’s will all be waiving delivery fees on orders fulfilled by DoorDash for those 60 and older.

DoorDash is leading the effort with participation from grocery solutions Freshop, GrocerKey, Mercato and Rosie. Customers will have the option of no-contact delivery. It’s not quite a blanket solution as there are some holes in coverage and some fine print, as outlined below. Here are the specifics from the press announcement:

  • Hy-Vee:  Starting March 31, Hy-Vee will offer free delivery to individuals who are 60 and older as well as expectant mothers and those who are considered high risk for illness in communities where Hy-Vee Aisles Online delivery orders are fulfilled by DoorDash. These customers will be able to use a designated promo code at checkout when they place their order through hy-vee.com/grocery. The promotion with Hy-Vee will cover up to 20,000 deliveries. 
  • GrocerKey: Partnering with market leading retailers throughout the U.S. and Canada, GrocerKey provides a full stack retailer branded eCommerce platform built for independent and regional grocery chains. GrocerKey also provides full service solutions, including in-store labor to pick and pack orders for fulfillment. In partnership with DoorDash, Kowalski’s, and Woodman’s, GrocerKey is extending free delivery to customers throughout Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois (details below on how to receive free delivery).  

    Woodman’s: Log in to your account on ShopWoodmans.com. If you are a new customer, please create an account first and then start shopping. The discount will be available through May 1. 

    Kowalski’s: Log in to your Kowalski’s On The Go account. If you are a new customer, please create an account first and then start shopping. The discount will be available through May 1. 
  • Mercato: Mercato provides online ordering and same-day delivery from high-quality independent grocery and specialty food stores across the country. To sign up for unlimited free delivery from any one of Mercato’s 900+ participating stores until May 7, visit Mercato.com, input your delivery zip code, and choose products from any of the stores in your delivery area. During checkout, you can sign up for a free trial of the Mercato Green delivery membership program, input the promo code OVER60, and you will be prompted to put in your date of birth. When the delivery arrives, you will also need to show ID verification to the delivery driver. [Ed. Note: This does not seem like no-contact, come on, Mercato, relax.]
  • Rosie: Rosie is the preferred eCommerce partner to independent retailers such as Rosauers Supermarkets, Super 1 Foods, Macey’s, and Gourmet A’Fare and many more. Find a full list of stores here. To sign up for free delivery through May 7, head to Rosie and use promo code “DDFREE” at checkout for nearly 200 participating retailers.
  • Freshop: Freshop builds eCommerce platforms for over 2,000 of the nation’s leading grocers and specialty retailers including Foodtown, Fisher’s Foods, Brookhaven and Hays and is adding 300+ stores a week in support of COVID-19 efforts. DoorDash has enabled many Freshop stores to start offering delivery during these challenging times. Learn more at https://www.freshop.com.

Today’s free delivery announcement follows the announcement earlier this week from ridesharing company, Lyft that it would be providing meal deliveries to the elderly and school kids.

Hold on to these bright spots, the dark times aren’t over yet.

Amazon’s Grocery Stores Are Headed for NYC, Will the Pandemic Change Any Building Plans?

If there’s any hope to be found nowadays, it could be that at least Amazon is carrying on like business will get back to normal at some point. Grocery Dive reports that Amazon is taking over the leases of two New York City stores that belonged to the now bankrupt Fairway Market chain.

Amazon paid a reported $1.5 million at auction for the stores, which are located in Paramus and Woodland Park. Amazon recently opened up a cashierless Go Grocery store in its hometown of Seattle, and was supposed to open up the first of its full-on supermarkets in Woodland Hills, CA this month but, you know, that probably getting pushed out, given the state of the world. Grocery Dive says Amazon is also interested in opening up grocery stores in Chicago, San Francisco and Philadelphia.

While there is some comfort in the fact that Amazon is forging ahead, one has to wonder if Amazon is altering any of its building plans because of the COVID-19 outbreak. Amazon has said its Woodland Hills location won’t have cashierless checkout, but as grocery retailers limit hours, put cashiers behind plexiglass shields and take other measures to reduce human contact, will Amazon reconsider? No cashiers is one less person on the frontlines of any future outbreak.

Additionally, we also know that the Woodside location will have some form of automated robot fulfillment. The question now is whether the surge in online grocery shopping occuring now, as people shelter in place, will continue after the outbreak recedes. Will Amazon, which already loves robots, build more of its future stores around e-commerce fulfillment automation into its future locations?

The question of how things will change for good once life gets back to normal is one we’re asking about a lot of our previous behaviors. But with Amazon just now building out grocery market locations from the ground up, it has the opportunity to capitalize on any new norms.

Mercato Can Get Independent Grocers Online and Delivering in 48 Hours

There is a conundrum in this time of COVID-19. While you’re supposed to shelter in place, you also want to support local businesses by getting groceries from your area market. But at least in our town, the local grocers don’t have online ordering or delivery. As a result, I turn to the big retailers (with decidedly mixed results).

But as with so many other segments of food tech landscape right now, startups are stepping up to help. Mercato is an online platform that enables independent grocery stores to have their own e-commerce and delivery operations. The Mercato platform takes care of all the order management and processing as well as online marketing, and connects stores with an independent network of 100,000 delivery drivers across the country.

Last week, Mercato launched a rapid on-boarding process with reduced setup fees that promises to get indie grocers online and selling in 48 hours. And yesterday, Mercato announced a partnership with wellness data company SPINS to provide stores with a more robust and customizable online shopping experiences.

I spoke with Bobby Brannigan, CEO of Mercato today, and he said that Mercato launched 20 grocers on its platform yesterday, and will launch another 40 stores today. By the end of this week, Brannigan said Mercato will be serving more than 1,000 stores.

“We help independent grocers compete,” Brannigan said, “They’re dealing with a massive surge in volume, it’s absolutely insane.”

The partnership with SPINS will integrate SPINS’ expansive product database into the Mercato system. This will allow independent grocers to broaden search and profile capabilities based on product attributes and nutrition content. For example, shoppers could search a corner grocery store on Mercato and filter products by items that are gluten-free or keto-friendly.

Though pricing depends on the number of stores and volume, Brannigan said that for the time being, Mercato has cut its setup fees in half, and that a subscription for it software starts at $349 a month.

As we’ve said before, the coronavirus outbreak is forcing the food industry to speed up the adoption of new technologies. Perhaps Mercato can be a lifeline to mom and pop grocery shops struggling to survive this outbreak, and create a great alternative for those of us stuck at home that want to shop locally.

The Food Tech Show: Instacarting Parents & Baking Bread Might be Our New Normal

As the pandemic rolls on and we stay at home while social distancing, many of us are exploring new ways of doing things.

For some this may mean Instacarting one’s parents. For others, it may mean making sourdough bread and showing off your efforts on Instagram.

The Spoon crew all dialed in from their remote locations to discuss how our behavior has changed as well as the continuing fallout of COVID-19 on restaurants. We also discuss the surge in hiring in the grocery sector as people shift their behavior to online shopping and whether or not COVID-19 could mean a comeback for meal kits.

As always, you can listen to the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts. You can also download it direct to your device or just click play below.

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Instacart to Add 300,000 Shoppers

Instacart is bulking up. The company announced today that it is responding to the surge in demand for its grocery delivery services by adding 300,000 shoppers to its platform over the next three months.

Instacart shoppers are the workers the company uses to go into stores, pick out the items customers order and deliver them. In a corporate blog post, Instacart Founder and CEO Apoorva Mehta wrote:

Today, we have more shoppers on the Instacart platform than ever before. Given the continued customer demand we expect over the coming months, we’ll be bringing on an additional 300,000 full-service shoppers to support cities nationwide. As more people look for immediate, flexible earnings opportunities during this time, we hope that Instacart can be an additional source of income for those looking to earn while also delivering for the communities in which they live.

Instacart operates in more than 5,500 cities. In a press release announcing the news, Instacart said that in the past few weeks, it has seen order volume grow by more than 150 percent year-over-year, with average customer basket size also increasing by 15 percent. The additional 300,000 full-service shoppers will more than double the size of its shopper workforce.

That the company is seeing such a spike in demand is not surprising. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced people into stocking up for what could be a long haul indoors. Many people adopting social distancing find it easier to have food delivered rather than interact with the (potentially contagious) general public at the grocery store.

I count myself among that surge in Instacart traffic even though it’s not available where I live. Instead I used it to order food for my elderly parents who are in a high-risk population and still stubborn about going to the grocery store in person.

Anyone who has tried to order groceries online recently has assuredly run into lengthy delays (I ordered from Safeway a week and half ago and it arrives tomorrow)(hopefully) and out-of-stock error messages. Instacart is among a number of companies looking to hire a lot of people immediately. Amazon wants to bring on 100,000 people for its delivery operations, Kroger is hiring 10,000 across the country, and Walmart plans to hire 150,000 new workers.

With COVID-19 decimating the restaurant industry and estimates that five to seven million service and kitchen jobs could be lost, any job could be a lifeline for those in need until this pandemic passes.

Just remember that all these Instacart, Amazon, Kroger and Walmart workers are on the front lines, putting themselves at risk going into stores and to your homes. So be kind and tip them generously.

COVID-19 Got Shoppers to Order Groceries Online, but Will They Keep Coming Back?

As COVID-19 has forced shoppers indoors, the growth curve of online grocery has suddenly accelerated, with downloads of popular grocery apps increasing by as much as 2000%. Shoppers who were previously hesitant to buy groceries online have found themselves now doing so out of necessity. It’s a bittersweet victory for online grocers who have long struggled to gain real traction.

But as the old adage says, “this too, shall pass.” The current crisis will subside, and when it does, it’s anybody’s prediction if grocery shoppers will retain their newfound affection for buying foodstuffs online. I believe that the outcome of that question will be determined by the kind of customer experience that online grocers deliver to shoppers now.

Here are three levels of effort that online grocers might want to focus on to make sure that experience will keep bringing shoppers back after the crisis has passed.

1. A functional platform and robust delivery capability is crucial

Online grocers with holes in their game need to scramble. They had better eliminate technical glitches, ensure that their back-end can support purchases in large volume, secure agreements with suppliers for gluts in demand, and validate that their pickup and delivery services are built to flexibly scale.

Even some very established players have seen troubles during this spike of new traffic. British online grocers like Ocado and others came face-to-face with this problem recently, as sites and apps repeatedly crashed under the weight of new users. Some ultimately had to turn new customers away, or create “virtual queues” just to use the service. Morrisons quickly updated its payment terms to make sure that deliveries from small suppliers would not be stymied by cash flow problems.

American retailers have rather famously faced logistics problems. Instacart, Amazon and others have been unable to meet their typical delivery commitments while Walmart, Target, and Amazon are all facing severe inventory problems on high-demand items.

While it’s understood that these are unusual times, online grocers should take a lesson and develop contingency plans for higher traffic. It’s a good time to take a hard look at both the technology and the support systems that you will need to service your new customers.

2. Make sure your shopping experience is easy 

Adoption of online grocery shopping to date has largely been driven by tech-savvy millennials. Provided that your online grocery shopping website and app have a half-decent user interface, these young shoppers will natively understand how to navigate them. But that may not be so true of those who have hopped on the bandwagon recently. Either way, ease and enjoyment of the online shopping experience can make or break loyalty to your online platform.

If your online shopping experience is not already as easy and smooth as it could be, now’s the time to change that. Products must be easy to find through search functions and intuitive shopping categories. Consider carefully how you are organizing product by category and sub-category, by brand, price, and even by lifestyle or dietary choices. Think about how to best present holiday and promotion items. If shoppers feel that it is difficult to find what they want, they’ll soon switch back to what they know.

Don’t neglect sign-up, check-out, and re-order, either. Think of online grocery as a means to “always have the customer in the store.” You can make shopping easier by proposing automatic delivery of common staples each shopper routinely purchases. The more seamless these routine functions are, the more customers will appreciate the convenience of shopping online.  

3. Make online shopping about personalization, imagination and discovery  

So what about online grocers who already have a functional platform that makes it easy for shoppers to get what they need? If you are one of these grocers, you are positioned to create not just a functional shopping experience, but an extraordinary one. Online grocery should not be just “a store on a website.” By making your online platform emulate something that it is not, you’ll miss out on making it something much better.

That something should include smart, personalized recommendations to customers. When a shopper puts fresh chicken breasts, bouillon cubes, and vegetables in their cart, you could recommend egg noodles for the chicken noodle soup they are making, but you could also suggest freshly squeezed orange juice or hot tea, honey, and ginger for whoever is nursing a cold. That vegan shopper who is always buying garbanzo beans and tahini will probably appreciate you suggesting the imported middle-eastern spices that just came in. And for that customer you know is looking to shed a few pounds, you could prioritize delicious, healthy foods that help him or her choose wisely. 

Henry Michaelson | Co-Founder, President & CTO at Halla 
While studying computer science at UC Berkeley, Henry co-founded Halla, a taste intelligence company that enables retailers to predict the personal preferences of their shoppers, all in real time. He is responsible for constantly improving Halla’s machine learning algorithm and for internal leadership, especially with respect to technology. Henry’s previous projects include machine learning based classification of supernovae in the UC Berkeley Astrophysics department, a speaking role in the Warner Brothers blockbuster comedy Project X, a three year stint as lead guitarist for Joe Banks, and a patented algorithm that has distributed over $7M in awards to mobile gamers.

Grocery Store Workers Are Now Front Line Workers. Be Kind to Them.

As I walked up to the cashier this morning at my local WinCo, she saw the big bulk bag of rice I had loaded on the conveyor belt, shook her head and looked visibly annoyed. She said something about the price of the bag.

I was confused and thought for a moment I had picked up something I wasn’t allowed to buy. I asked her if I needed to go get the price from the aisle and she shook her head.

“The price is on the bottom of the bag. I have to pick that bag up to ring it and it’s too heavy for me,” she said.

I instantly felt pretty horrible for indulging my newfound doomsday prepper sense of dread with a 10 pound bag of rice.

I asked her if things have been hard lately.

“I’ve been working 12 hour days for the past week.”

Like many of you, I thought a lot about the people who are working the types of jobs that require them to be in contact with people all day, every day, during this crisis. Grocery stores, in particular, are getting crushed with long lines of people who might or might not be infected and who are, almost to a person, uneasy about the future. That leads to lots of short tempers and stress for those doing their job.

I asked the woman if I could help her lift the bag up to the scanner and she said yes. We talked for a while and she told me about workers who have been working for two weeks straight without a day off and one coworker who hadn’t really had a break for 48 hours.

I thanked her for her hard work and that we appreciate what she’s doing. She nodded and went on to scan the next customer’s groceries.

While someday we’ll no doubt see lots more automated checkout and other technology that will change the way our grocery stores look and operate, the reality is grocery stores rely on humans who are working hard and, in days like this, potentially sacrificing their own well being.

Many of the workers at this store were young, but not all. No matter the age, everyone I talked to or interacted with were professional and polite. Even my checker, although tired, was professional and worked quickly.

Listen, this is going to be long and working at grocery stores is now a front lines job. We need to be kind to them. We’re in this together and we especially need to show it to those working hard for us while potentially sacrificing their own personal wellbeing.

Tastermonial Lets You Scan Grocery Items to See Which are the Best Fit for Your Diet

Sticking to a diet — or avoiding an allergen — is hard enough without having to worry about potentially hidden ingredients in grocery products. Does that jerky have soy in it, or do those potato chips actually contain dairy?

One startup is trying to make grocery shopping more transparent and personalized. Tastermonial is a new startup based in the Bay Area which offers a link between personalized nutrition services and actual food brands. Users can download the Tastermonial app and use it to scan products on grocery shelves. The app then extracts nutritional data and gives viewers a readout of the item, noting whether or not it would be a good fit for them to eat, based off of their pre-saved dietary profile. If it’s not, Tastermonial will recommend other, better-suited grocery products available via delivery through one of their retail partners.

Founded in July 2019 by Bude Piccin, the startup launched a beta version of its app in January 2020 and currently has about 200 users. Thus far Tastermonial’s database includes over 400,000 SKUs, including everything from CPGs to frozen and refrigerated foods. Piccin said that they pull nutritional data from public databases.

On a recent phone call, Piccin told me that the app can only scan items and give both a general evaluation (good choice for many diets) and a personal evaluation (not suitable for you based on your profile). They plan to roll out the ability to purchase through retail partners later this year, starting with Piccin’s former employer, Amazon.

Thus far, users have to input their own dietary preferences and any food allergens, however, Tastermonial plans to let users link its app to microbiome- or DNA-driven food personalization services to automatically upload their nutrition profile. The company is already in talks with DAYTWO, a personalized nutrition company which recommends recipes to individuals based on their microbiome.

Tastermonial’s app is free to use. The company plans to make money by adding a small fee (5 to 10 percent) onto each sale through their retail partners. There’s also a SaaS play. Piccin said that Tastermonial will partner with personalized nutrition services, like DAYTWO, to provide the ingredient layer to those recipe recommendations. She explained that Tastermonial’s database could help users select the most health-appropriate foods for their suggested meals — all of which could be delivered to their door.

Since the company is so early-stage, it’s hard to predict if it’ll be able to follow through on its plans to become the go-to interface for grocery shopping based on your nutrition. But Tastermonial is tapping into a trend that, like Hansel, is so hot right now: personalization. (So hot, in fact, that we had a whole conference dedicated to personalization a few weeks ago in NYC.)

In addition to Tastermonial, there are several other companies racing to bring personalization to the grocery store. Pinto (formerly Sage Project) and DNA Nudge are two startups that pull from individuals’ nutrition profiles to help them decide which retail products are best suited to their needs. According to Piccin, Tastermonial’s differentiator is its ability to connect users with alternative products that are better for them, if the grocery options don’t cut it. “We’re connecting to that practical side,” she told me.

My question is whether or not consumers will actually take that extra step. Will people really create an entire online grocery order for one or two items, pay a premium for delivery, and wait for it to show up at their door?

Tastermonial is betting on it. Considering that 81 percent of consumers never order groceries online, that’s a risky bet, which is why I think that Tastermonial’s SaaS play has more potential than the app itself. As personalized nutrition services become more popular, more and more people will be looking for ways to easily shop for the best ingredients for their individual needs. If it becomes part of the personalized nutrition services themselves, Tastermonial could help make the process just a little bit easier.