Key insights
- Thrive Market is leveraging AI to personalize grocery shopping based on member data, aiming to simplify healthy eating choices. By curating products and filtering based on dietary needs, they intend to cut through marketing noise and become a trusted source for health-conscious consumers. This could lead to increased customer loyalty and market share within the online grocery sector.
Thrive Market CEO Nick Green explains how the company uses member data to simplify grocery shopping.
I was so inspired by how you're using AI for your entire company for meal planning. Tell tell us about that. It it's so exciting.
I mean it's just incredible how fast the world is changing. and you know, as I zoom out how much since you know, since we started the company, uh launching back in at the end of 2014, you know, there's so many things that have changed. Um but there there is one thing that's the same and that's that people are wanting to get healthier and it's still not easy.
Mm-hmm.
And you know, we made it easier by cutting down the barrier to from geography. We've been really successful at cutting down the barrier to price, but I think until now, the one barrier we've always seen that's really fundamental, uh is really just the the problem of of choosing and kind of finding out what's good figuring out what's good and what's not. And I think when people go into a grocery store, one of the biggest challenges is like, everything now makes a health claim. Whether it's unhealthy or healthy, it's going to make a health claim. And if you go on social media, you have influencers saying exactly opposite things about what you should do for your health. And you have health trends that everyone thinks they're like, you know, the bee's knees and then a year later it's like, oh no, actually, you know, sugar alcohols aren't so good. And so, you know, what we've always tried to do is cut through that noise and be that trusted source.
So give people, you know, we're not trying to be the everything store like an Amazon. We're ultra curated. We have these filters that you can find the products that meet your diets. Um we try to, you know, clear away the hype, have only the highest quality products and make it really easy for people to find that. And how this comes to AI is that for the first time, I think we're going to have an absolute step function in how well we can help people do that, where you don't need to come in knowing what products you're looking for or even what diet you're describing to. If you come in with health goals for you and your family, we take you now through a linear proces like an an onboarding process where you answer questions. That data maps against the entire data set of historical thrive market members and we're able to actually build your cart for you on that first order.
How amazing.
And it's not that that the cart's going to be perfect, but half of the items, over half of the items on first order now are coming from that AI cart. And, you know, these AI algorithms, the models are only going to get better.
You know, we're working on that figuring out how do we do that on nth order. So not just the first order, but get intelligent as people put together their further orders. Um and, you know, ultimately, the world that we can end up going to is really one where grocery shopping doesn't have to be this like tedious process of putting individual items in, but rather it's a collaboration with an AI who has, you know, an understanding of what you need, what your family is looking for, but also has this enormous data set to draw on.
And, you know, that's what we're now finding is so valuable in in our business is we have 1.7 million members. We know not just people in general but specifically the consumer that that cares about health and wellness, what they need and that data can enable us to help anyone coming into the onto the platform to find the right products.