How This Online Grocery Service Is Changing The Way We Consume Food

Excess waste is one of the biggest issues facing the grocery industry today, with 31% of the available food supply at the retail and consumer levels written off as a loss. (Source: USDA)

I recently spoke with Ben McKean, CEO & founder of Hungryroot, the only grocery and recipe delivery service designed to make healthy eating easy, personal, and sustainable. Ben and I discussed how AI is at the center of what Hungryroot does – from helping to reduce food waste, to impacting the way consumers eat.

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Gary Drenik: Thank you for meeting with me today, Ben. To start, tell me about the mission behind Hungryroot and how it’s different from other online grocers.

Ben McKean: Eating healthy is hard. Customers tell us all the time – besides the countless hours each week spent planning, shopping for, and finally cooking meals for their households, the mental burden of the whole process is just too much. Add wanting to eat healthy to the mix and many are ready to give up, instead turning to more costly and less healthy alternatives like take out or fast food. That’s why we’ve made it our mission to make healthy eating easy – instead of overwhelming. We’re doing what no other store or service does by blending recipe discovery, food planning and shopping to create a stress-relieving, personalized experience that gets better with every visit.

Meal kits and other delivery services have yet to address these pain points – they lack variety, they don’t always offer healthy groceries that are catered to specific dietary preferences, and recipes are often labor-intensive and take too long to prepare. On-demand and instant delivery services only cater to a very specific “last minute” use-case. That’s why we see so much opportunity around our personalized, customer-first approach to building the food experience that consumers are craving most.

Drenik: Explain how your company’s tech advancements are leading your industry forward.

McKean: At the height of Covid-19, we started to see the migration to online accelerate, with grocers of all kinds transforming their physical stores into digital shopping aisles. But as consumers become accustomed to the convenience of getting groceries delivered at home, they now expect more from their e-tailer of choice. Consumers don’t just want an in-store experience digitized – they want to spend less time on meal planning, they want their grocery store to make their experience better with each visit, and they want their grocer to understand their needs. At Hungryroot, we believe creating personalized customer experiences, or a “personalized grocery store,” is the future of grocery and what consumers will continue to seek out.

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When a Hungryroot customer signs up, they take a quiz about their food preferences: things like dietary goals, family size, etc., and then our AI-powered platform fills their cart with grocery and recipe recommendations. Each week, we get to know the customer better – whenever they edit their cart, say, to add a recipe we didn’t think they’d like, Hungryroot learns, and becomes better with each visit. And while our AI allows us to make the traditional grocery experience better for the customer overall, we’re also making an impact on the environment and helping our customers reduce their food waste footprint too.

Drenik: That’s a great point, 43 billion pounds of food in American grocery stores is thrown away (Source: USDA). How can artificial intelligence help tackle America’s problem with food wastage?

McKean: That’s true and it’s an alarming number to say the least. At the company’s inception, we identified food waste – both in-store and at home – as a larger issue in the food industry. And because making an impact on individuals and our planet alike is important to us at Hungryroot, we have built sustainability into our core business model.

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Since our AI knows about our customers’ needs, preferences, and goals, we’re able to recommend healthy groceries framed in recipes that show them how to make use of every ingredient they get. With recipe support catered to households of all sizes, we’re reducing the chance that customers are left with half-bags of spinach that go to waste instead of being fully utilized. One of our customers even reported they’ve “only discarded one small potato, a stalk of asparagus, and two pieces of shaved brussels sprouts in the past year using Hungryroot.”

Additionally, as you mentioned above, grocery stores are one of the root causes of food waste in America. The AI at the center of what Hungryroot does, allows us to have dramatically less waste not just at the consumers’ homes but at our warehouses too. Since we know exactly what our customers want in their carts each week, we only source what we’re actually able to sell—enabling us to have one of the lowest food waste percentages in the industry, which sits at 2% as opposed to the industry norm of 30% (source).

Drenik: How does Hungryroot’s technology influence individual eating habits?

McKean: Our proprietary technology creates personalized recommendations to help introduce customers to foods we know they will love based on what we know about them. In our role as a trusted guide, we can encourage customers to make food choices that are better for the planet. For example, a recent survey conducted by Prosper Insights and Analytics shared that consumers are buying more meatless foods (+8.6%), plant-based beverages (+7.8%), and plant-based meat products (+4.4%) to achieve more of a flexitarian lifestyle. So, if a customer shares that they want to receive more proteins in their weekly deliveries, but they also want to eat healthier overall as a personal goal, our tech can recommend a combination of animal and plant-based proteins for the customer. As time goes on, and in monitoring the customers’ purchasing and consumption patterns, we can slowly begin incorporating more and more plant-based proteins into their carts at the customer’s discretion. This allows a sense of product discovery for the customer but also helps to encourage them to make healthier food choices that positively impact themselves and the planet.

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Drenik: What does the future of grocery shopping look like?

McKean: A recent Prosper Insights and Analytics survey found that consumer use of “home delivery services” at the store they shop most often for groceries has more than doubled since 2019, which is very much in line with trends we’re seeing on our end as well. We expect to see more and more consumers shifting to e-commerce or other online solutions for their weekly grocery shopping due to the ease and added convenience of it. As more and more consumers shift their shopping habits online, it’s no longer enough to just put forward basic ease and convenience. Consumers have come to expect more – they want the convenience of at-home delivery, a curated experience, healthy food picked specifically for them, and guidance on how to make use of the food. At Hungryroot, we believe it’s essential to provide consumers with a best-in-class experience that’s personal and sustainable, which is why we’ve made it our goal to redefine how consumers plan, purchase, and consume food.

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Drenik: Thank you, Ben, for introducing me to Hungryroot and providing valuable insights into how your service is using AI for the better of consumers, and the environment.