Grocery Visual Search Engine

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Gradient Edge, a UK-based technology start-up focusing on innovations in the digital commerce, data and machine learning space, are developing a Grocery Visual Search Engine capability in partnership with Innovate UK.Founded by James Wiltshire and Andy Hill, Gradient Edge is focused on helping retailers bring next generation data-driven experiences to their digital commerce platforms.The project will develop a dedicated grocery domain computer vision capability, combining custom state-of-the-art machine learning models, with a performant cloud-native scalable architecture.The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, and in particular the unprecedented lockdown measures, have placed huge societal importance around the accessibility, performance, scalability and usability of online services - most notably online grocery shopping.A profound shift in food shopping behaviour from physical store visits to online has been necessitated - especially among the older and vulnerable populations, many requiring shielding from any outside contact whatsoever.There have been well-documented challenges with the capacity and usability of the main UK supermarkets' online grocery services. Many first time users have been unable to register, unable to book delivery slots, and have found the online user experience difficult and confusing - especially navigating or searching across huge product ranges with only free text field search input matching.We think there is huge potential for a new wave of GroceryTech.The project will develop a core service that can power a host of new improved online grocery shopping experiences, including visual product search, quick shopping/favourites/replenishment list creation, enhanced product substitution, aggregated/marketplace product availability or price comparison optimisation.Importantly our solution will be designed, prototyped and iterated to enhance accessibility and improve the online grocery shopping user experience for more people, including those less digitally savvy.The plan is to collaboration with UK supermarkets and wider grocery online services to pilot the benefits of the new technology as quickly as possible for as broad a section of the population as possible.