A Taste of Retail’s Low-Waste Future
Our team is harnessing Generative AI to reduce food waste in-store and at-home, transform the way we shop and save consumers money along the way.
What a waste
Food waste is a truly global challenge and one we all have a responsibility to tackle. In the UK alone 9.5 million tonnes of food waste are generated every single year. This a huge problem from a climate perspective, with our food contributing around a third of total human-created greenhouse gas emissions according to the UN.
Put simply, we’re consuming too much and we’re doing it in a pretty inefficient way. We can’t solve all our problems by reducing food waste, but we can make a pretty significant impact, saving almost 10% of our total greenhouse gas emissions.
However, when food waste is being generated both in-store and at home, this problem is a really difficult one to solve.
Shopping with Purpose
We need to flip the narrative. Change how we purchase products fundamentally, from the ground up. We need “Outcome Retail”.
Fortunately, as people, we process “purpose” much more intuitively. I’m buying food to cook dinner, I’m buying a car to get my family from A-B. Purpose is the origin of intent and needs to be more efficiently translated into action.
Instead of asking what products you want to buy, we envision the future of retail playing an advisory role, connecting need and purpose with product. Where do you want to be, not how do you want to get there.
This has the advantage of also, reducing cognitive load with the customer and avoiding the often overwhelming “Choice Paradox”.
Being Inspired
So, how do we bring “Outcome Retail” to grocery and reduce at-home and in-store food waste in the process?
Our team was inspired by products in-market like Wasteless (dynamic pricing to incentivise purchase of near-expiry products), HelloFresh (meal prepping) and others. These organisations are already making significant progress in reducing food waste and helping guide customers towards meals rather than ingredients. We wondered if we could bridge these concepts and take them further.
So we imagined an app, called Be Inspired, that helps you plan your cooking for the week.
You let our app know how many people you’re cooking for, what your taste profiles are like and we’ll help you plan a series of meals, using an intelligent recommendation engine to minimise in-store and at home food waste.
Intelligence driving Impact
But how would this app minimise food waste? Well, we loved the work our friends at Wasteless are doing to incentivise the use of near-expiry products and thought we could take that one step further.
So, our recommendation engine factors in any “near expiry” products in-store, prioritising recipe suggestions that use those products (if suitable for the customer).
By further motivating the sale of these products, building on ideas like dynamic pricing as products get closer to expiry, we can give stores a mechanism to manage their stock levels more effectively and reduce waste.
To reduce waste at home, we consider recipes you’ve already selected as you iterate through the recipe recommendations, using those selections to both improve the taste profile we use for recommendation and to identify potential “waste” from one recipe, such that it can be reused in another recipe.
Shopping, Simplified.
To achieve these two reductions, we map these recipes to an intelligent search on-top of our headless ecommerce, this helps us identify the perfect products we can recommend to the user to reduce their waste.
So once you’ve selected your recipes, you click one button to turn that into a fully populated, ready-to-checkout basket. Our engine does all of the hard work, turning a complicated week’s shop into a fast, cost-efficient task, whilst reducing waste in the process.
It’s almost too good to be true in terms of the benefits, whilst we do need to consider the impact of the technology we’re introducing here, we believe that the reduction in food waste possible by changing the way we approach shopping vastly outweighs any technology costs.
A Retail Revolution
This is just the beginning for our team and “Outcome Retail”. We believe this idea of shopping with purpose and intent is the future of how customers will interact with retailers and we’re really excited to see what you all think about the concept.
We’d love to start a dialogue around this topic so please reach out and let us know what you think.
You can read much more about our research, experiments and vision for the future of retail at our minisite:
