Focus on AI: In Partnership With Work & Co
The grocery store of the future is using AI to feed Americans healthier food
Hungryroot has built a $300+ million online grocery business by shopping for its customers.
By Dan Frommer on Monday, May 13, 2024 at 8:00 am
Online grocery shopping is one of the pandemic-era consumer behaviors that actually stuck, moving tens of billions of dollars in annual spending to e-commerce. Some of that spending has shifted away from the traditional grocery retail industry (and intermediaries like Instacart) to digital-first players with new ideas and interfaces.
One of those winners so far has been Hungryroot, a nearly decade-old online grocery startup that takes a different approach to food shopping: The majority of the groceries it sells and ships across the country — 70% — have been proactively picked for its customers by algorithm, instead of relying on consumers to search or browse for specific items.
Specifically, Hungryroot is obsessively focused on customer retention, using machine learning AI to predict which assortment of meals and groceries will keep customers hooked for each subsequent shipment, its founder and CEO Ben McKean tells me.
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