Profiling human taste: FPR and Halla partner to offer personalized grocery shopping

23 Sep 2019 --- Mobile checkout and service counter solutions provider FutureProof Retail (FPR) is partnering with Halla, a software company that profiles human taste to help people make better food choices. The collaboration will employ FPR’s mobile self-scanning checkout and service counter solutions with Halla’s Intelligent Ordering (I/O) engine to offer personalized recommendations to consumers. The news comes as personalization in nutrition is gaining momentum and the sector is seeing exponential growth in NPD and services.

“Retailers are well-positioned for personalized nutrition innovations because they have so much interaction with the consumer and of course because they actually buy their food there. Moreover, the possibility to interact on a transparent basis is at the foundation of every personalized nutrition scheme,” Nard Clabbers, Senior Business Developer Personalized Nutrition at TNO, tells NutritionInsight.

The partnership was announced during the Groceryshop event in Las Vegas, US. FPR’s solution enables shoppers to use their smartphones to scan items while they are shopping. They can then pay on their phone, skip the lines at checkout and leave the store. With Halla’s I/O technology, retailers can provide personalized recommendations in FPR’s app, as soon as customers start shopping, when they scan items, and based on all items in their cart before they check out.

Halla I/O uses advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to analyze products, recipes, restaurant dishes, ingredients and nutrition information to “understand” taste. As a result, I/O does not just recommend items frequently bought together; it understands what specific dishes the customer is shopping to prepare, such as pasta bolognese, based on the items in the cart.

FPR’s solution enables shoppers to use their smartphones to scan items while they are shopping.Clabbers explains that this is not the first example of the retail industry engaging with the personalized nutrition phenomenon. “There are other examples, such as Alhold Delhaize buying FoodFirst Network (personalized advice on nutrition and wellness) or Waitrose experimenting with the London based personalized nutrition start-up OmeHealth on personalized advice on the shop floor and beyond.” 

Halla’s recommendations influence sales based not only on past purchases but also on the emotional discovery of products the shopper had not planned to buy. The result of this is that grocery retailers may gain shoppers, increase basket sizes and shopping frequency. 

“Amazon generates 35 percent of its sales through recommendations,” says Di Di Chan, President of FPR. “The integration of FutureProof Retail's self-scanning checkout solution with Halla I/O provides retailers with the same revenue potential in-store.”

According to Clabbers, everyone has their own preferences and no one’s diet is exactly the same. In a way, he explains, everyone is already at the point where they have a personalized diet. However, there is still much to gain via the use of methods that may help people make the healthy choice more obvious and simple. 

Altering retail to boost nutrition
According to a recent study, altering the default order in which foods are shown on the screen, or offering substitutes lower in saturated fat could help customers make healthier choices when shopping for food online. The researchers note that the findings could provide effective strategies to improve the nutritional quality of online food purchases.

Technology and apps are increasingly identified as a tool to improve nutritional habits and even predict disease. A network-based machine learning platform that can identify food-based, cancer-beating molecules was created by Imperial College London researchers. The platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) to process huge volumes of data on a network of smartphones while they charge overnight. 

In the same space, Mayo Clinic and Viome – a company transforming health through personalized nutrition based on individual and microbiome biology – joined forces to explore the potential of Viome’s artificial intelligence (AI)-driven personalized diets in helping to manage disorders such as sleep apnea and obesity. 

By Kristiana Lalou, with additional reporting by Laxmi Haigh