Recipe box brand Gousto has broken cover on Bento, a tech-focused spin-off company which “absolutely could be bigger than Gousto”, its chief customer officer told The Grocer.
Bento offers existing and aspiring subscription-model businesses a full tech platform as well as artificial intelligence modules and consultancy services, all based on the same technology underpinning Gousto’s own operations.
“It’s a software-as-a-service play. We’re on a product journey, and once you build that platform fully out and you’re able to onboard customers at the tens, hundreds a month, there’s absolutely a trajectory where Bento could be bigger than Gousto,” Bento’s CCO Daljit Bamford said. “That’s me trying to be humble.”
Bento was born out of Gousto’s own challenge in not being able to “find the tech to keep growing”. Having built its subscription technology in-house, it is now pitching it to other merchants, be they existing subscription-based DTC players, or “scaled merchants looking to enter subscriptions”. It has operated “very much under the radar” as it built the proposition – with which it is now going to market.
“For years [Gousto CEO and founder] Timo [Boldt] has said that Gousto is a tech and data company that loves food, given the investment they’ve made. A question that kept coming up is: You keep talking about this amazing tech and data, have you ever thought about productising it?” Bamford said.
The company says it is already working with several merchants under NDA, but named personalised petfood brand Blink! as an early adopter.
There is a 20-strong team of engineers at work within Bento. Boldt serves as chair and advisor, while Gousto’s first hire Ricardo Hummel serves as its chief operating officer. The company’s chief technology officer is Mitch Beard, formerly of Palantir Technologies. Bamford was previously UK chief customer officer at Salesforce.
Its offerings include: Bento Box, a “headless, API-first platform”; Wasabi, made up of Data Science and Service AI modules covering churn prediction, cancellation interruption and customer reactivation; and consultancy services, which help customers “switcheroo”.
Subscription-based businesses typically run on one of two types of tech, Bamford explained; tech that has been built in house, or bought off the shelf.
“There are a lot of other Goustos out there that have already done the home build – but that’s difficult, it takes a lot of investment, a lot of innovation and typically the added features only get built if you’ve got a clear ROI on building that particular feature,” she said.
“Then you’ve got the ones who are operating more off the shelf. But they’re finding they can’t test as much as they want, they can’t bundle their propositions, and they’re doing hacks on top of the core infrastructure to try and make it work. Which is fine at a certain level, but as you scale operationally and your volumes go up, the complexity increases.”
Available subscription technology tends to be built for the “subscribe and save” model of subscriptions. “That’s very hard to flex and do very clever things when that’s your technology foundation,” Bamford said.
Bento will pitch to businesses globally wanting to tap a subscription box market predicted to be worth $130.7bn in 2031, according to Business Research Insights. One of its primary targets initially is petfood – expected to grow in value from $690m globally in 2022 to $2.4bn in 2032.
Although the cost of living crisis saw many consumers ditch the subscriptions they had taken up during the Covid pandemic, Bamford says the model is now making a strong return, and being considered by major retailers and supermarkets.
“Some sectors have been remarkably resilient,” she said. “It’s convenience. That’s why people are switching more and more to subscriptions.”
“If I buy eight pints of milk, 12 eggs and some cheese and some basics every week, why am I having to come into your supermarket, or why am I having to go onto your app? Why are you not bundling that up?” Bamford added. “The first retailer that offers that – I will probably go with them.”
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