Mobile Food Scanner App Aims to Empower Grocery Consumers And Deliver Personalized Experiences
Date: 3/14/2019

Eating healthy food is a conscious decision that many people across the globe are gravitating towards in a bid to meet their health goals.

However, in the hurried frenzy of everyday life, practicing healthy eating can prove to be a big challenge.

One of the easiest ways of following through on healthy eating is by checking what you put into your body. Which is why using a mobile food scanner when shopping for groceries makes complete “good health” sense.

Picking up on this huge opportunity to empower retail grocery consumers, Swiss technology company Scandit introduced its mobile food scanner app which has been designed to assist consumers in their buying choices.

The company is expecting a number of grocery stores across the US to provide this feature to consumers in the coming few months.

The aim of the mobile food scanner is to allow consumers to quickly and easily pick up food items that best suit their dietary needs without having to worry about harmful ingredients.

As Scandit CEO Samuel Mueller puts it: "Standing in front of shelves filled with hundreds of items can be an intimidating experience.

Instead of picking the best item, many shoppers just give up and pick the most familiar one. (Augmented reality) filtering enables shoppers to quickly see beyond the shelves and into the products themselves so they can find exactly what they want in the most efficient way."

Consumers will now be able to filter out products based on their needs while browsing online or while buying the food items of their choice. The app provides consumers with a list of categories including lactose-free or nut free which they can then use to filter and customize their purchases according to their preferences.

Once this is done, consumers simply have to aim their smartphones at a grocery case and their device screens will display icons over the items which best suit their dietary requirements.

Worried about food allergies?

Around 4% of US adults and 5% of children in the US suffer from food allergies. A mobile food scanner which can tell you if certain foods are free of nuts that you are allergic to, or foods that are lactose-free or gluten-free, can be a boon to people suffering from food allergies.

Now consumers don’t need to spend excessive amounts of time reading labels on different food items to know the exact ingredients and whether or not it is safe for their consumption. Your grocery shopping can be over in minutes!

Trying out a new exercise regimen?

One of the first steps when starting a health regimen, be it a diet regime or an exercise regime, that you need to consider is eating healthy.

Cutting down on calories, which means you need to watch out for fats, sugars, and carbohydrates (depending on the dietary regime) is a critical consideration.

Using a mobile food scanner you can now go ahead and select food items off the grocery shelf which best meet your dietary recommendations.

Whether you are a vegan, or you only consume organic foods, or even if you are skipping only specific food groups, all you need to do is scan the barcodes of the food items you want to buy and you will receive detailed information about the list of ingredients, the nutritional values of each ingredient, and its incompatibilities.

This kind of detailed information simplifies buying decisions for consumers.

Personalized Retail Experiences

With Amazon Go already taking off, the need for delivering personalized retail experiences is only gaining more ground and picking up momentum. Retail consumers expect stores to meet their shopping demands quickly and painlessly.

And if retail grocery stores want to beat the competition and lower cart abandonment, they need to ensure they address consumer pain-points and meet their expectations in a way that fosters brand loyalty.

One of the best ways for retail grocery stores to do this is via technology adoption and is easier to do because of the lower taxes they are now facing.

There is an increasing need to use technology solutions as a way of minimizing the time consumers spend on looking for products of their choice, ensuring faster checkouts, and optimizing on inventory management so fast moving or high in-demand products are always in stock.

The mobile food scanner builds on these experiences by taking the shopping experience even further by allowing consumers to check and assure themselves that the food items they want are the ones that meet all their dietary requirements.