Build Visual Search Technology into your Online Shopping Experience

• Background

  A major grocery retailer that serves over 11 million customers daily with a commitment to reducing food waste came to Clarifai through its digital media agency to build a custom AI powered food classification model. The food model served as the foundation for an app that they were developing to drive online food ordering and delivery scheduling.

• Information

  Use Case

  Food classification

  Industry

  Grocery

  Client

  Major Grocery Retailer

Challenge

The grocery retailer wanted to elevate online sales and delivery to help keep people safe during the 2021 pandemic. Since more people were cooking at home and perhaps getting bored with the same meal plan, they needed to find a way to offer customers more creative meal choices and make cooking a fun experience for them. They wanted to create a Twitter app, a bot, that would recommend recipes based on some of the items customers had on hand. The app would not only help online sales, but also support the retailer's mission of reducing food waste.

Solution

To help build an app that would offer recipes to customers through a Twitter recipe recommendation bot, the retailer’s digital agency partnered with Clarifai because of its ability to quickly create a food model that could recognize over 1,000 food items in images down to the ingredient level. The model was trained and built using Clarifai’s computer vision and deep learning AI lifecycle platform. The platform relied on its SpaceTime deep visual search functionality to search and find food items in images that shoppers sent to the grocer’s Twitter app. The Clarifai platform’s Armada Predict technology was used to compare and find similar food images in the retailers catalog and the app was able to offer recipe recommendations.

Results

The grocery retailer improved their social media engagement by growing their Twitter following by 15,000 followers in two months. As a result, their website traffic from their online shopping page increased by 7% in three months. They improved shopping cart conversions to 4% above industry average. In addition, the retailer has contributed to public safety by reducing in-store foot traffic, and the app is helping to build brand loyalty and lifetime customer value.

• Using Clarifai’s deep learning AI platform to create a custom model has given us the ability to identify ingredients in uploaded images and scan through thousands of our unique recipes within seconds to deliver a list of personalized recommendations to our customers."

  Chief Marketing Officer