What is Grocery Shopii?
Grocery Shopii shortens the meal planning and online shopping experience to 5 minutes or less by using machine learning to fuel a recipe recommendation engine for groceries. The application integrates directly with a grocer’s Ecommerce, filling carts instantly with the ingredients needed for the chosen recipe.
Current industry landscape
Digital transformation has hit the grocery industry like a ton of bricks, quickly separating the followers from the leaders. Leaders are doubling down on digital and are hyper-focused on rapid grocery delivery. Laggards are watching and waiting to determine which offering will deliver the greatest upside post-pandemic, and may have their lunch eaten in the process!
Establishing the company
As a busy parent, company founder Katie Hotze struggled to find the time to determine what the family would make for dinner each week. She continued to find herself wandering the grocery store after work, tired kids in tow, looking for something that constitutes a meal. As a digital marketer, she set out to build a better way for working parents everywhere. The shopping journey for groceries needed to be online, where a digital user experience could be designed that catered to busy people who need meals, not just groceries. Hotze worked with mentors to build a prototype and tested it locally in Charlotte, N.C. During this time of discovery, she learned that the pain of “what’s for dinner?” was plaguing parents daily, and this business opportunity could be quite massive if a solution was built to improve it.
How Grocery Shopii works
The Shopii platform is a white-label, cloud-based solution that integrates sophisticated recipe shopping functionality that lives on the grocer’s website and integrates directly into a grocer’s cart. Powered by machine learning, the shopping platform is flooded with thousands of recipes from top food bloggers and food brands, and acts as a recommendation engine for recipes that fills a shopper’s cart in real-time with the ingredients needed to make the selected recipes. Grocers can add this shopping experience to their website, typically on a Recipes or Meal Planning tab, with a simple activation that looks and feels just like their own store brand. The experience is mobile-friendly and continues to launch new features that expedite the shopping process and remove the friction that is notorious for causing cart abandonment in grocery E-commerce.
The company impact
Grocery Shopii is changing the historically archaic online grocery space by fueling a shopping experience that increases checkouts by over 500% when shoppers engage with their recipe platform. In an industry plagued with cart abandonment rates in the 70-85% range, this opportunity to drive shoppers to the finish line will capture millions of dollars in unrealized revenue for the company’s grocery retail clients, including Reasor’s Food Markets in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The company’s greater passion, though, is supporting busy people with a fast method to build and fulfill a meal plan for the week, saving them time, money, and sanity. The reality is there is no shortage of recipes on the internet, but they don’t exist inside the shopping journey for food items. Young families desire recipes that have been validated by chefs and top food brands, and yet many scramble to source dinner each night as they don’t have the time to find those fresh, exciting recipes, identify the ingredients needed, and source them online or in-store. By removing this pain point for busy people, Grocery Shopii believes it has unlocked a tremendous opportunity to serve a vast global audience with a service that will give them back time with their families.
About the team
The team runs on a work hard/play hard model where everyone is part of the overall success of the company. The leadership team is comprised of the founder and CEO, Katie Hotze, alongside CTO and co-founder, Mike Johnson; CFO Jennifer Huddleston; Sales Leader Jeff Rains; and Culinary Director Jessica Bentley, known for her popular food blog Slice of Jess.
The team’s experience is a combination of corporate, military, and entrepreneurial tracks, and all have one thing in common – they are high-energy, all day, every day. Though they are remote, the team convenes quarterly at retreats where they stay together, strategize together, and build team rapport that powers them through long days and monumental opportunities.
“I’ve built this company on the concept of Blue Ocean Strategy, a book that coached me through the importance of building where there is little to no competition. Being different is a great thing, particularly in a digital space where there are no limitations, and we use this to our advantage when building partnerships and closing new contracts. We build technology for the future of grocery, not the past, and we lift the digital capabilities of grocers who may not have the resources to compete with jumbo retailers. It’s our passion to empower them to win the digital battle for dinner, and we take a tremendous amount of pride in being their preferred partner to accelerate their Ecommerce sales.” - Katie Hotze, Founder
Check them out: https://www.groceryshopii.com/
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