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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Restaurant Software Company Popmenu Raises $4.5M in Series A Funding

Atlanta, GA-based Popmenu, which makes guest engagement software for restaurants, just announced a $4.5 million Series A round led by Base10 Partners’ Rexhi Dollaku and with participation from Felicis Ventures’ Niki Pezeshki. To date, Popmenu has raised a total of $6 million.

Popmenu positions its SaaS platform specifically as a way for restaurants to regain more control over their branding online. That’s something food businesses in particular struggle with in an age when Yelp, Google, and third-party delivery sites double as discovery engines but are also known for posting mediocre photos, biased reviews, and other material that doesn’t always accurately represent a restaurant.

Popmenu is trying to change that by moving the digital conversation about any given restaurant back to the restaurant’s own website. Its cloud-based software provides a dynamic menu experience for customers, who can also upload photos, leave reviews, and interact with one another without leaving the restaurant’s own branded area online. They can also receive special offers and promotions. On the back end, restaurants get the advantage of real-time menu management and data analytics tools that can tell them more about customers and their preferences.

It remains to be seen if those features will be enough to entice restaurants to sign up with the service, and for customers to actually leave Yelp, Google, Grubhub, and other third-party sites, whose streamlined user experiences make them easy to use and therefore convenient.

“Restaurateurs are passionate and personally invested in their business, and to be able to help them feel a greater sense of control over their digital presence means everything to us,” Tony Roy, President and Co-Founder of Popmenu, said in a statement.

Restaurant review tools aside, he has a point. As off-premises restaurant orders proliferate and more businesses try their hand at the virtual restaurant concept, online branding is becoming as important as the food itself. Already, some chains are taking back control on parts of the delivery process, and discovery and recommendations are definitely a part of that.

According to the press release, the new funding will go towards further R&D for Popmenu’s platform. 

FutureProof Retail to Add AI-Based Grocery Recommendations From Halla

FutureProof Retail, which provides mobile checkout technology for grocers, announced today that it will incorporate Halla’s AI-based product recommendations into its service.

FutureProof Retail uses mobile phones to create a line-free checkout process for supermarkets. Unlike other cashierless checkout solutions that install cameras and use computer vision to identify what you purchase, FutureProof moves everything to a whitelabeled app from the retailer on your phone. You scan barcodes to add items to your cart, and when you’re done, you hit a checkout button and a store employee does a quick check of your bag to make sure you aren’t shoplifting. You can see it in action in this video:

Express Checkout El Rancho Awareness Video from FutureProof Retail on Vimeo.

With today’s announcement, when people scan an item Halla’s recommendation engine will kick in to suggest a complementary product right there on the phone’s screen. So if you scanned a bag of Tostito’s chips, the app would recommend salsa. But Halla’s recommendations are also dynamic and adapt as you shop. As we wrote when the company raised $1.4 million in May of this year:

…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.

Halla developed its recommendations based on data from anonymized grocery transactions to see what items are typically purchased at the same time, as well as restaurant and menu items (menu descriptions are, after all, typically a list of ingredients). Halla had initially started off making recommendations for restaurants as well, but pivoted away from that to focus on grocery.

It’s important to note that Halla will only provide one recommendation per item. “As of today our recommendations are focused on complementary products with one goal in mind, what is most likely to be purchased,” Halla Co-Founder and CEO, Spencer Price, told me by phone this week. Price said that this focus on a single product is important because shopping is a very emotional experience for people, and one that can’t be junked up with lots of pop-ups on a phone screen with lists to scroll through.

FutureProof works with Fairway Markets in New York and other regional grocery chains, though Price was unable to provide a timeline or location for where its recommendations will go live through this partnership.

Almost as important as the news itself is the fact that FutureProof has publicly named Halla as a partner. There are other AI-based food recommendation engines out there like Spoonshot and Analytical Flavor Systems, but they are pretty quiet about their clientele.

I’m not fully convinced about the broad adoption of FutureProof’s cashierless implementation. Manually scanning products and having a human check your bag before you leave a store seems to bring friction into a process that is supposed to be frictionless. Regardless, for those who do use it, FutureProof’s app requirement seems like a good vehicle for Halla’s technology because of its immediacy and visual cues. I imagine the company will look towards announcing partnerships with smart shelf displays like AWM Smart Shelf in the near future.

Halla Launches AI-Powered B2B Food Recommendation Platform

Let’s say you’ve bought a chicken sandwich. Based just on that purchase, what do you think is a better recommendation for another meal you might enjoy: chicken piccata, or a hamburger?

This is a typical type of problem that LA-based startup, Halla, is trying to solve with its new artificial intelligence (AI) powered recommendation platform. The new Halla I/O (which stands for “Intelligent Ordering”) software integrates with a restaurant or grocer’s existing website or app, so it’s invisible to the end user. People buying groceries or meals through those apps would continue to do so, but would receive recommendations through Halla’s algorithm.

Halla I/O does this, according to Co-Founder and CEO Spencer Price, by combining data and psychographics around how people think and interact with food. Let’s go back to the chicken sandwich example. According to Price, a traditional data science approach would recommend chicken piccata, because it’s, well, chicken.

But, “The human experience of eating food is different,” Price said. He went on to describe how the chicken sandwich is also meat-centered, covered on both sides with bread and eaten by hand. And when you think of it that way, a hamburger recommendation makes sense.

Price didn’t say that the chicken piccata was wrong, per se, but just provided it as an example to illustrate how Halla I/O’s AI works differently. Using a proprietary dataset from more than 10,000 grocery items, 20,000 ingredients, 175,000 recipes and 20 million restaurant dishes, Price said that his company has 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.

With that information, Price said Halla I/O can provide more contextual and more meaningful recommendations. On a surface level, this means Halla I/O can make very basic recommendations. If you are buying salt, it might recommend pepper. But if you put salt and ground beef and onions into your cart, Halla I/O might infer that you’re making a bolognese. Not only will it recommend more items needed to make a bolognese, Halla I/O will show you recommended recipes and automatically add all the ingredients for that recipe to your cart. If you’ve shopped with that app before, Halla I/O will know if you purchased tomato sauce recently, and automatically remove that from the recommendation.

Though Halla I/O works for both restaurants and grocers, right now Halla I/O is only in pilot programs with four grocers. Interestingly, one of the pilots was with Green Zebra in Portland OR. Instead of online cart recommendations, Halla provides shelf recommendations. For example, they may see that lots of people are buying bananas and peanut butter, and set up a physical display to take advantage of that.

Halla is at the nexus of two trends we’re following at The Spoon: personalization and shoppable recipes. If its software works as promised, not only will it deliver better recommendations, but the ability to automatically recommend and adjust cart items based on recipes could be another step towards customized meal kits.

Halla is just seven employees, and has raised $500,000 in angel funding. It’s going to need more than a scrappy startup spirit, however, as the AI-powered recommendation space has plenty of competition. Startups like Dishq, Foodpairing and Plantjammer are all running their own algorithms to deliver more relevant recommendations.

Pretty soon, grocers and restaurants will need an AI-based recommendation engine to recommend the best AI-based recommendation engine.


An earlier version of this article stated that Green Zebra does not have online ordering capabilities. The grocer does through Instacart, and we have updated the post.