Grocery shopping app Cherrypick taps machine learning to learn what’s in customers’ cupboards
Grocery shopping app Cherrypick, which recently changed its name from Lollipop, has rolled out a new feature that uses machine learning to learn what’s in users’ cupboards, with the aim of speeding up their weekly shop and reducing food waste.
Cherrypick allows its more than 200,000 users to browse nearly 1,000 recipes and order the ingredients to make them in less than five minutes.
The company partners with Sainsbury’s for products and fulfilment, and plans to add other grocery retailers in early 2024.
It leveraged data analysis technology to build a dataset containing millions of choices that customers made when selecting recipes.
It then used machine learning to spot patterns in the data and predict when people might already have enough of a product. It claims that this enables users to make 22% fewer decisions when choosing recipes.
As well as building a picture of what users have at home, Cherrypick also minimises food waste by identifying duplicate ingredients across their basket.
For example, a user who orders ingredients for two recipes that both use 500g of pasta would receive one 1kg packet.
As part of its mission to “help people eat better effortlessly”, Cherrypick is assembling a board of food and health experts to guide feature development.
They include: Dr Yanaina Chavez-Ugalde, a University of Cambridge researcher who will help develop proprietary data models to show customers the UPF make-up of their food choices; Rhiannon Lambert, a Harley Street nutritionist and author.
Tom Foster-Carter, Cherrypick CEO and Co-founder, says: “Half of the global population will be overweight or obese by 2035. But people are not to blame. Convenience food is.”
“Ready meals and takeaways are packed with ultra-processed, calorie dense ingredients. Old school convenience is killing us, but busy households don’t have the time or tools to fight back.”
“Cherrypick is helping to build a new era of convenience where everyone can eat better and health, convenience, and value are no longer in tension.”
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