Spoon Guru: Catering for shoppers’ evolving dietary needs, with Nutrition AI
75% YoY revenue growth since collaborating with Google Cloud
Halves ML model development setup time from two hours to one with Vertex AI
Processes 14 billion data points daily, and 20,000 products per minute, with serverless infrastructure
Reduces sales cycle, secures significant Canadian retail account, and expands into new verticals with Google Marketplace
With Google Cloud, Spoon Guru gained the scalable infrastructure, innovative AI technology, and commercial opportunities it needed to unlock rapid growth
With Google Cloud, Spoon Guru gained the scalable infrastructure, innovative AI technology, and commercial opportunities it needed to unlock rapid growth
Our dietary habits are changing. Food allergies are on the rise, plant-based diets are becoming commonplace, and more consumers are prioritizing healthy eating. But from vegetarian to vegan, kosher to halal, gluten-free to low GI, finding the right foods can be a challenge–one that for food allergy sufferers comes with potentially severe consequences. It was this challenge that Markus Stripf, CPMO and Co-Founder of Spoon Guru, set out to solve when he and his co-founders built their platform.
“For shoppers on an exclusion diet, finding the right food in the supermarket was a frustrating experience,” Stripf recalls. “We built Spoon Guru to help people find the right food for their requirements. We knew that for those affected by an allergy or intolerance, there’s zero margin for error. So it was important we got it right.”
Stripf and his co-founders launched Spoon Guru in 2015. With the help of AI, and supervised by a team of expert nutritionists, the app gathers all the available data points on a food product, cleans it up, and uses it to label products in a structured, consistent way. Spoon Guru’s retailer customers use this enriched metadata to make it easier for shoppers on their apps and websites to find exactly the right food for their needs.
Within a year of its launch, Spoon Guru had signed a deal with Tesco, and went on to win a number of awards on both sides of the Atlantic. However, Spoon Guru soon found it hard to scale up. “We managed to get some significant traction, but we couldn't scale either technically or commercially on our own,” explains Stripf. “We are a relatively small company, and sales cycles are very long. For us to scale commercially, we needed to be aligned with a strategic partner to go to market more quickly. At the same time, technology moves at such a pace, we wanted to be sure we could keep up.”
Finding the right partner for growth
It was these two dimensions–the commercial and the technological–that convinced Spoon Guru that Google Cloud was the right fit for its ambitions, combining technological innovation with the global reach and go-to-market initiatives of Google Cloud Marketplace.
“We felt our mission fully aligned with Google’s. Google organizes the world’s information and makes it universally accessible–and that’s precisely what we are doing with food,” Stripf explains. “With Google Cloud pushing the envelope with AI, there were so many potential synergies. We jumped at the chance to team up with Google Cloud.”
We felt our mission fully aligned with Google’s. Google organizes the world’s information and makes it universally accessible–and that’s precisely what we are doing with food. With Google Cloud pushing the envelope with AI, there were so many potential synergies. We jumped at the chance to team up with Google Cloud.
Markus Stripf
CPMO and Co-Founder, Spoon Guru
Processing data four times faster with serverless cloud architecture
Spoon Guru migrated to Google Cloud in 2023 with the support of Google Cloud Partner Appsbroker | CTS. The company’s serverless architecture, based on Cloud Run, now gives it more flexibility in development, as well as the ability to scale its resources to meet growing customer demand.
“Previously there was a lot of infrastructure management, but with a serverless architecture, that’s all gone,” explains Anne Marie Muscat, Engineering and Data Science Manager at Spoon Guru. “By giving our developers more autonomy to test new features more quickly, Cloud Run makes the whole development flow easier. And because our infrastructure automatically scales up and down on demand, we are no longer paying for resources we don’t need.”
By giving our developers more autonomy to test new features more quickly, Cloud Run makes the whole development flow easier. And because our infrastructure automatically scales up and down on demand, we are no longer paying for resources we don’t need.
Anne Marie Muscat
Engineering and Data Science Manager, Spoon Guru
This auto-scaling infrastructure has allowed Spoon Guru to move away from batch processing to end-to-end processing, enabling it to process retailers’ ever-changing product data in real time. Since migrating from its previous cloud provider, Spoon Guru can process products four times faster, increasing its capacity to 20,000 products per minute. This allows retailers to provide shoppers with the most accurate and up-to-date product information, essential for shoppers whose allergies leave them no margin for error.
Managing the entire ML lifecycle with Vertex AI
Vertex AI helps us manage the whole ML lifecycle. We can build and test a new model quickly. And we don’t need a DevOps person to deploy it, we can simply deploy it through Vertex AI for production. Vertex AI makes the whole workflow a lot easier.
Anne Marie Muscat
Engineering and Data Science Manager, Spoon Guru
Data processing and modeling is at the heart of the Spoon Guru app, with the company processing more than 14 billion data points a day with Google Cloud. The data is stored in Google Firestore, Cloud Storage, and BigQuery, with Spoon Guru using Vertex AI to build, train, test, and deploy machine learning (ML) models to clean up, normalize, and model that data. For example, ML models help Spoon Guru to process the available data on a given product, organize it into particular attributes, such as “low in cholesterol” or “nut free”, and fill in any missing attributes based on the huge dataset it has been trained on.
“We use our data to tag products with hundreds of dietary attributes, which retailers can use to allow shoppers to search for a specific product, filter products by attribute, or find the right ingredients for a specific recipe,” Stripf explains.
“When shoppers conduct a dietary search, they spend 10% more on average. When they use dietary filters, they add 13% more products to cart. Consumer trust goes up, loyalty goes up, and it has a direct impact on retailers’ bottom line.”
Spoon Guru also uses ML models to power product recommendations, substitutes, or healthier alternatives based on a shopper’s dietary needs. With Vertex AI, Spoon Guru is able to build and run its ML models in one integrated platform, giving it more agility in its model development and halving its development setup time from two hours to one. “Vertex AI helps us manage the whole ML lifecycle,” explains Muscat. “We can build and test a new model quickly. And we don’t need a DevOps person to deploy it, we can simply deploy it through Vertex AI for production. Vertex AI makes the whole workflow a lot easier.”
Most recently, Spoon Guru has used Vertex AI to develop a generative AI feature for retailers that allows shoppers to enter a natural language prompt and receive specific product or recipe suggestions. Built on the company’s vast dataset and powered by PaLM 2 models, this new tool enables users to benefit from an even more personalized shopping experience and further lowers the barriers to shoppers finding the right foods.
Opening the door to a world of commercial opportunities
After migration, Spoon Guru launched on Google Cloud Marketplace, expanding its market reach by gaining access to all Google Cloud customers, as well as aligning on go-to-market strategies and sharing the stage at high-profile industry events. Working together, Spoon Guru and Google Cloud have been able to offer retailers the combined power of Google Cloud search capabilities with Spoon Guru’s enriched metadata.
“Google Cloud has opened doors for us with their customers. It’s been a fantastic collaboration, with great synergies between our products allowing us to take a very powerful joint proposition to market,” says Stripf.
Spoon Guru has already won two new contracts as a result, agreeing terms in just three months, as opposed to the two-year sales cycles the company was used to.
Previously we were just one of thousands of startups, a tiny company out on our own. Working with Google Cloud has brought commercial opportunities to grow and scale. And on the technical side, we have access to a phenomenal resource. Operating on the bleeding edge of technology is incredibly exciting.
Stripf
CPMO and Co-Founder, Spoon Guru
These reduced sales cycles have in turn allowed Spoon Guru’s small team to invest its time in further developing and growing the business. The company is now on track to grow its revenue by 75% year over year since it started working with Google Cloud.
Spoon Guru is now looking at how it can apply its technology to new verticals, such as health and fitness and travel, with new deals already in the pipeline. For Stripf, Spoon Guru’s relationship with Google Cloud is integral to this continued expansion.
“Previously we were just one of thousands of startups, a tiny company out on our own,” Stripf recalls. “Working with Google Cloud has brought commercial opportunities to grow and scale. And on the technical side, we have access to a phenomenal resource. Operating on the bleeding edge of technology is incredibly exciting.”
Founders, Markus Stripf, Tim Allen, and Simon O’Regan have been passionate advocates of a more intelligent and compassionate commerce due to their personal experiences with food allergies. They created Spoon Guru to solve the enormous challenge of helping people find food that meets their needs. And, when Andy, the former CEO of Asda/Walmart, joined forces with them it was apparent that what had started as a consumer cause was now an opportunity for smart retailers to differentiate and optimize their shopping experiences.
Industries: Retail, Technology
Location: United Kingdom
Products: Google Cloud, BigQuery, Cloud Run, Cloud Storage, Datastore, Vertex AI
