What’s the Story?

The Coresight Research team will attend and participate in this year’s Groceryshop conference, which will be held on September 19–22, 2021, in Las Vegas, US. The conference will address the sudden transformation in the retail environment since the outbreak of Covid-19, as the industry is looking to embrace technology and innovation to address new challenges. On September 19, 2021, Deborah Weinswig, CEO and Founder of Coresight Research, will emcee and feature on the judging panel of Groceryshop 2021’s “Shark Reef” Startup Pitch Competition, in which 12 early-stage US retail-technology startups will compete to win the Shark’s Choice and Audience Choice awards. In this report, we present a preview of the competition, covering its format and the judging panel as well as a profile for each participating startup. Weinswig and Ken Fenyo, President of Research and Advisory at Coresight Research, will also participate in three panel discussions at Groceryshop 2021, which we preview at the end of this report.

Preview: Groceryshop 2021—“Shark Reef” Startup Pitch Competition

The Groceryshop 2021 “Shark Reef” Startup Pitch Competition will comprise three sessions through the day, across which the 12 retail-technology startups will each give a three-minute presentation to a panel of expert judges and the audience on how their innovations and solutions are impacting the retail industry. The judges will lead a short Q&A following each presentation. In the final session, the judging panel will reveal the Shark’s Choice winner and the audience will have the opportunity to cast their votes for the Audience Choice winner. The three expert judges for the Shark Reef Pitch Competition are as follows:

• Deborah Weinswig, CEO and Founder of Coresight Research
• Brita Rosenheim, Partner at strategic and transaction advisory services firm Culterra Capital
• Elaine Russell, Co-Lead for Albertsons Fund at venture capital and technology investment firm Greycroft

The Startups Coresight Research categorizes the 12 startups into four areas of disruption in retail: 1. Consumer analytics and seamless shopping: Maintaining a high market share in a post-pandemic world is a challenge for retailers and CPG brands alike. By understanding shifts in consumer behavior, brands and retailers can more effectively focus their campaigns to their target audiences. Retail-technology companies are helping to predict consumer choices, create digital product-request forms, analyze online product reviews and more—with the aim of enhancing personalization and creating seamless shopping experiences. Startups: Birdie, Grocery Shopii, QualSights, WeStock 2. Experiential marketing and marketing technology: Innovation in performance marketing and analytics technologies allow retailers and CPG brands to capture every aspect of the online customer journey and meet key marketing goals. Moreover, brands have turned to new experiential marketing opportunities amid pandemic-related restrictions on socializing and traveling. Startups: Pear Commerce, Showplace 3. Spatial analytics and insights: Understanding customers’ journeys through store spaces and interactions with in-store staff is a crucial element of physical retail. Spatial intelligence tools, including GPS and artificial intelligence (AI) can provide businesses with an edge over competitors and offer insights to inform inventory management optimization. Startups: Pathr.ai, SIRL 4. Sustainability and supply chain innovation: AI, automation and integrated technologies have disrupted supply chains for several years now, and we expect to see the coming years bring innovation to address sustainability and inventory challenges. Prioritizing waste reduction, avoiding stockouts and efficient recycling models through technology innovation will give retail players a head start. Startups: Olyns, Ox, Well Principled, Wisy Below, we profile each of the 12 startups (in alphabetical order). Birdie Founded in 2018 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Birdie uses AI to provide real-time insights to CPG brands on consumers’ feedback and opinions. The company’s software platform uses AI and natural language processing to convert comments, reviews and other online conservations into structured and realistic customer insights to inform business and marketing decisions. Birdie’s offering adds allows CPG brands and retailers to fine-tune their marketing strategy to suit specific audiences with real-time insights. The company’s focus on product planning and reducing time-to-market are its primary drivers for client acquisition. The company identifies itself as the industry’s first comprehensive AI-based insights-as-a-service platform.

• Speaker: Pat Osorio, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer
• Area of disruption: Consumer analytics and seamless shopping

Grocery Shopii Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Davidson, North Carolina, Grocery Shopii is a retail technology company offering a white-labeled shoppable recipe platform. The company uses predictive analytics and machine learning technology to offer personalized meal planning recommendations, allowing shoppers to plan and shop for a week’s worth of meals in under five minutes, according to the company. Grocery Shopii helps its clients differentiate themselves from large variety-driven e-commerce players by enabling them to directly divert customer attention to private-label products, specific CPG partners or promotions—among other strategy-aligned goals.

• Speaker: Katie Hotze, Founder and CEO
• Area of disruption: Consumer analytics and seamless shopping

Olyns Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Campbell, California, Olyns is a technology-centric recycling solution provider. The company provides AI-powered smart recycling kiosks, known as smart cubes, for users to deposit plastic and aluminum waste. The kiosks are located in places with high pedestrian traffic and linked to a mobile app that incentivizes users by offering rewards for recycling their waste. The waste items are automatically sorted by the machine and crushed ahead of recycling and the kiosks are automated to send out an alert to the removals team once they are approaching their waste capacity. Olyns has identified 140,000 suitable locations for its high-tech recycling kiosks across the US, with particular opportunities in the 40 states that still do not have a deposit system for recycling plastic bottles.

• Speaker: Philip Stanger
• Area of disruption: Sustainability and supply chain innovation

Ox Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, Ox is an order fulfillment platform that leverages machine learning to assist retailers in supply chain optimization. The company’s aim is to offer technology that is accessible, scalable and good for business in order to level the playing field for retailers. The company has positioned itself as a solution provider for faster and more accurate fulfillment. The retail environment has been greatly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced retailers to recalibrate and look for new solutions to keep up with the growing consumer needs and overcoming supply chain hurdles, reduced workforce and safety issues. Ox’s solutions improve the efficiency and accuracy of the whole supply chain process of retailers. For instance, its augmented reality technology improves the speed of order picking by up to 15% and improves accuracy by 80% in comparison to any other existing technology, according to the company. The company’s future growth will be based on how it continues to offer unique solutions that increase productivity and competitiveness for its clients amid the fast-changing retail landscape.

• Speaker: Charu Thomas, Founder and CEO
• Area of disruption: Sustainability and supply chain innovation

Pathr.ai Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Mountain View, California, Pathr.ai is a spatial intelligence platform that uses real-time anonymous location data to draw business insights from the way that people and objects move through a physical environment. Pathr.ai is unique in its delivery of consumer behavior insights, which are ascertained through advanced data analysis, mapping, movement evaluation and predictive algorithms. This provides an understanding of store floor dynamics and customers’ browsing and buying behavior patterns, thus providing insights for retailers to optimize sales, inventory and logistics strategies.

• Speaker: George Shaw, Founder and CEO
• Area of disruption: Spatial analytics and insights

Pear Commerce Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Pear Commerce is an online marketing platform that bridges the gap between CPGs and retailers. The platform embeds directly into current CPG digital advertisements and collects the information of the consumers, which allows CPG players to better understand consumer behavior and purchasing patterns. Performance marketing is a significant driver behind successful e-commerce conversions for CPG brands and retailers. Pear commerce helps its clients to strategize on increasing conversions, check in-store stock in real time and ensure that previously purchased products are re-marketed to customers.

• Speaker: Eric Martell, Co-Founder
• Area of Disruption: Experiential marketing and marketing technology

QualSights Founded as QualSights in 2016 (formerly Georama) and headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, QualSights is an immersive insights platform. The company aims to transform the way businesses determine meaningful insights by better understanding human behavior. Using its proprietary software platform, QualSights provides end-to-end qualitative tools that generate consumer insights at a global scale and allow businesses to study and understand consumer behavior in a faster and more affordable manner. Clients can leverage their deeper understanding of consumer behavior and capitalize on this opportunity to make informed judgments to propel their business performance. QualSights deploys advanced research tools powered by AI, including its customer insights platform, scalable project templates and video feedback kiosks.

• Speaker: Nihal Advani, Founder and CEO
• Area of disruption: Consumer analytics and seamless shopping

Showplace Founded in 2019 and headquartered in San Mateo, California, Showplace is an in-home retail platform that facilitates product placements in vacation rentals and homestays through online marketplace Airbnb. The company’s application enables CPG brands to create campaigns and interact with hosts about the products they would like to make available for guests. Showplace’s solution helps brands to place their products strategically within a property, enabling guests to trial and learn more about the products that are located intuitively inside the space by scanning related QR codes. The company’s application helps brands to customize campaigns and interact with hosts about featuring products they would like to place at any property. In addition, Showplace’s surveys allow companies to measure traffic and organic responses to their products. Experiential living as a concept is gaining popularity, and companies in the hospitality industry identify it as an opportunity for a new approach to product placement and sampling. It creates new and more holistic avenues for product marketing and sales compared to traditional in-store product sampling campaigns.

• Speaker: Justin Miller, Co-Founder and CEO
• Area of disruption: Experiential Marketing and marketing technology

SIRL Founded in 2017 and headquartered in New York City, SIRL is an indoor GPS and customer analytics platform. The platform assists shoppers in locating products within a store, tracks shopper journeys to generate insights for retailers and provides optimized routes for employees to improve efficiency. SIRL’s mobile platform aims to enhance customer experiences while generating unique data streams that can provide insights into how retailers can increase their sales and reduce their operational costs. The platform tracks customer movements inside a store and the amount of time that they spend shopping. As such, retailers can leverage high traffic and conversion areas in a store to optimize marketing promotions and promote specific products. The platform also helps retailers to identify missed sales conversion opportunities and the necessary hurdles to address.

• Speaker: Michael Wang, Co-Founder and CEO
• Area of disruption: Spatial analytics and insights

Well Principled Founded in 2018 and headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, Well Principled is an AI technology firm that improves marketing and supply chain processes for CPGs and retail companies. It uses AI models that blend business intelligence and data to create process optimization plans that would otherwise be developed by human, capital-intensive teams. Given that accurately understanding return on advertising spend and creative outdoor advertising is still ambiguous, Well Principled understands that its clients need reliability when it comes to attribution of advertising budget. The company also provides as well as a concise relation between revenue growth and advertising spend—allowing its clients to make clear decisions before allocating resources in marketing and supply chains.

• Speaker: Ryan Richt, Founder and CEO
• Area of disruption: Sustainability and supply chain innovation

WeStock Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Fort Lee, New Jersey, WeStock is a retail technology company that helps brands to launch their products in new locations. According to the company, its platform acts as an enabler for consumer insights, leading to better product launches and sales growth. WeStock’s crowdstocking platform helps its clients to collect and utilize shopper data and build customer request forms for new products. These insights can help CPG companies to decipher product requests and shape their strategy to meet buyers’ demands.

• Speaker: Cameron McCarthy, Co-Founder and CEO
• Area of disruption: Consumer analytics and seamless shopping

Wisy Founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Wisy is a retail intelligence platform that assists CPG companies and retailers with artificial AI-based stocking and supply chain solutions. Wisy’s platform integrates AI, machine learning and image recognition technologies to derive real-time data and understand shelf replenishment inside stores, as well as inform category management, demand forecasting and product assortment. This helps retailers to plan inventories effectively and improve store efficiency across locations. The uniqueness of Wisy’s offering lies in the number of issues it claims to address on a single platform. While the retail intelligence space is brimming with demand forecasting and predictive analytics startups, Wisy stands out for this distinctive approach.

• Speaker: Min Chen, Co-Founder and CEO
• Area of disruption: Sustainability and supply chain innovation

Coresight Research at Groceryshop 2021: Panel Discussions

The Coresight Research team will participate in three panel discussions during the conference, addressing a range of key themes and developments in grocery retail. Food as a Force for : 11.15 a.m.–11.35 a.m. on Tuesday, September 21, 2021 Deborah Weinswig, CEO and Founder of Coresight Research, will discuss how food can be a force for positive change within the grocery retail industry in conversation with Hanneke Faber, President of Foods and Refreshment at consumer goods company Unilever. New Customer Loyalty Strategies: 4.00 p.m.–4.40 p.m. on Tuesday, September 21, 2021 As part of the conversation on “Marketing to Today’s Consumer” at Groceryshop 2021, Coresight Research will chair a panel discussion on recent innovative approaches to customer loyalty and what the future holds for customer relationships. The panelists are as follows:

• Mike Molitor, Head of E-Commerce and Loyalty, family-owned grocery store chain Bashas
• Andrew Thomas, VP of Marketing at seafood sourcing and packaging company Chicken of the Sea International
• Amii Lang, Head of E-Commerce and Loyalty at family-owned regional supermarket chain Heinen’s Grocery Store
• Ken Fenyo, President, Research and Advisory, Coresight Research

Review and Key Takeaways: 10.05 a.m.–11.05 a.m. on Wednesday, September 22, 2021 Coresight Research’s Ken Fenyo will participate in a wrap-up discussion on key learnings from the conference during this final session. Fenyo will review implementable insights from the conference. The panel comprises:

• Ken Fenyo, President, Research and Advisory, Coresight Research
• Anne Mezzenga, Co-CEO of Omni Talk, a blog written by retailers, for retailers
• Joe Laszlo, VP Content at Groceryshop