Gross-ery Shopping (Part 1)
I wrote a quick idea for grocery stores a while back:
It would be a huge time saver to have an app that uses image recognition to scan packaging and come back to me with a big green check-mark if it matches dietary restrictions, health goals, isn’t in my pantry at home and complements other things I have or am buying. — Re-Tale Retail
I want to revisit this. Of all household rituals, grocery day was by far the worst for me growing up.
To bring context, I lived in a joint-family of 13 people, and the grocery shopping responsibility would rotate between the adults in the house. I’d be dragged along when it was my parents’ turn. Shopping for 13 is already a quantitative headache, but as alluded to by my earlier post, we were vegetarian, and everyone had their own dietary cautions — some watched their sodium, others watched their sugar.
After struggling to find a parking spot, I’d grab a cart and drive it along the path inspired by years of consumer behaviour research. We’d grab the essentials, then sift through endless fine-print and make judgement calls on the vegetarian-friendliness of ingredients we couldn’t pronounce. We’d put most items down to be safe, and we’d be on our way. Finally, we’d unload 20–30 bags of groceries at home and pass them along a comical human conveyor belt that led to the fridge and pantry. All in, the process took ~5 prime hours of a weekend.
Apart from it being a large-scale operation for 13, I think my story is experientially similar for those with dietary considerations. And I have a hunch that the consumer of the future desires to be more considerate of their eating habits.
Grocery stores are at the top of the funnel when it comes to what ends up on our dinner tables, and at the surface level, it is not in their best financial interest to help us be more considerate. But at a deeper level, grocery stores would find a lot of value from being more helpful to their shoppers on the basis of providing an excellent customer experience and growing loyalty.
The image recognition app I wrote about may offer a novel in-store shopping experience, but the overall customer experience problem remains — grocery stores are overwhelming and navigating the items is a pain. There’s a level of personalization that physical grocery stores can never offer, and the customer of the future will expect. And that’s where I think grocery delivery services have an important role to play. Services like Instacart have digitized the physical grocery store experience and can enable users to be more thoughtful about how we buy instead of fall prey to consumer behaviour tactics.
I’d be willing to give Instacart information on my eating preferences, dietary restrictions and health goals if the app can distill the thousand-plus items a grocery store wants to sell me, down to the one hundred products it can sell me, and better yet — should sell me. I’d appreciate recommendations on what’s good for me more than filtering through fine-print on a Saturday afternoon. I think newcomers to a country, people trying new eating habits and individuals with special diets like athletes may feel the same.
Continued on Gross-ery Shopping (Part 2)
