Sainsbury’s is applying machine learning to Twitter feeds, Instagram posts and foodie blogs to help it ‘spot the next avocado on toast’.
The supermarket has worked with Google and Accenture to build an insight tool which ingests social media posts, editorials and other public information in order to predict the next big food fads.
Sainsbury’s will use the trend-spotting tool to adjust product ranges in stores in response to local online hype.
“The grocery market continues to change rapidly. We know our customers want high quality at great value and that finding innovative and distinctive products is increasingly important to them,” said Phil Jordan, group chief information officer of Sainsbury’s.
Thanks to the platform Sainsbury’s is “generating new insights into how the world eats and lives, to help us stay ahead of market trends and provide an even better shopping experience for our customers”, he said.
Google’s cloud computing arm provided analytics tools to “ingest, clean and classify that data”, while Accenture worked with Sainsbury’s technology division to build a custom user-interface which is used by the supermarket’s commercial teams.
Internal users can “navigate through a variety of filters and categories”, said Google Cloud UK managing director Alan Coad, and spot trends “in real-time”.
“From foodie hashtags on Instagram to the latest cooking fads, customers want to stay connected to the latest trends,” Coad said. “Sainsbury’s is looking to the cloud to help them stay a step ahead,” he added.
Accenture’s managing director for retail Adrian Bertschinger said the platform “will help Sainsbury’s identify trends much earlier and adapt their product assortment in a faster, more informed way - all for the benefit of customers”.
Data and insights were placed at the centre of Sainsbury’s business strategy in its 2019 annual report. The supermarket is busy hiring for a number of data engineer and data scientist roles, telling candidates it has “data from billions of transactions for our teams to play with”.
The company is also seeking to better pool and scrutinise the data held across its various brands - which includes Argos, Tu, Habitat, Sainsbury’s Bank and its loyalty scheme Nectar.
Speaking at a London conference earlier this month, Sainsbury’s chief data and analytics officer Helen Hunter said the company was working to bring disparate stores of data together and enable more employees to discover the insights within.
“The focus on delivering business value early, to be experimental, to be curious, to inspect, to adapt is really important when doing something like this. There isn’t yet a blueprint to follow,” Hunter said.
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