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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

SPINS

Innit Teams With SPINS to Add Personalization, Guided Cooking and Shoppable Recipes to Grocer Websites

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.

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.