As dietary habits evolve, with increasing awareness around food allergies, plant-based diets, and health-conscious eating, consumers face significant challenges in finding the right products to meet their needs.

For those with specific dietary restrictions, such as gluten intolerance or food allergies, making the wrong choice can have serious consequences.

Recognising this gap, Markus Stripf, CPMO and Co-Founder of Spoon Guru, along with his co-founders, set out to create a solution that would simplify the shopping experience for consumers with dietary requirements.

Reflecting on the motivation behind Spoon Guru’s creation, Stripf stated: “For shoppers on an exclusion diet, finding the right food in the supermarket was a frustrating experience. 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.”

Launched in 2015, Spoon Guru uses AI, supervised by expert nutritionists, to gather and process vast amounts of data on food products. The platform cleans up this data and labels products with structured, consistent information, making it easier for retailers and consumers to find suitable products. Within just a year of its launch, Spoon Guru secured a partnership with Tesco and earned several awards across the Atlantic. However, the company soon encountered challenges in scaling both technically and commercially.

“We managed to get some significant traction, but we couldn't scale either technically or commercially on our own,” Stripf explained. “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.”

This realisation led Spoon Guru to partner with Google Cloud in 2023. The collaboration offered Spoon Guru access to cutting-edge AI technology and a global platform to scale its operations. Spoon Guru migrated to Google Cloud with the support of Google Cloud Partner Appsbroker | CTS, adopting a serverless architecture based on Cloud Run. This move has provided the company with greater flexibility in development and the ability to scale resources according to customer demand.

Anne Marie Muscat, Engineering and Data Science Manager at Spoon Guru, highlighted the benefits of this transition: “Previously there was a lot of infrastructure management, but with a serverless architecture, that’s all gone. 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.”

The new infrastructure has allowed Spoon Guru to transition from batch processing to real-time processing, significantly enhancing its ability to handle retailers’ dynamic product data. The company can now process products four times faster, managing up to 20,000 products per minute, ensuring that consumers receive the most accurate and up-to-date information – essential for those with dietary restrictions.

Central to Spoon Guru’s operations is its data processing and modelling, with over 14 billion data points processed daily using Google Cloud’s tools. The data is stored and managed across Google Firestore, Cloud Storage, and BigQuery, while Vertex AI is used to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models. These models help Spoon Guru categorise products with specific dietary attributes, such as ‘low in cholesterol’ or ‘nut-free’, and fill in any missing information using the extensive dataset available.

“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 elaborated.

The impact of these innovations on consumer behaviour is significant. According to Stripf, shoppers who use dietary search filters spend 10% more on average and add 13% more products to their carts. This not only increases consumer trust and loyalty but also directly boosts retailers’ bottom lines.

Beyond product filtering, Spoon Guru leverages ML models to recommend products, substitutes, or healthier alternatives based on a shopper’s dietary needs. Vertex AI’s integrated platform has streamlined Spoon Guru’s ML development process, cutting development setup times in half.

Muscat noted: “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.”

Recently, Spoon Guru has expanded its capabilities with a Generative AI feature that allows shoppers to input natural language prompts and receive tailored product or recipe suggestions. Powered by PaLM 2 models and Spoon Guru’s extensive dataset, this feature enhances the personalised shopping experience, making it even easier for consumers to find the right foods.

After migrating to Google Cloud, Spoon Guru launched on Google Cloud Marketplace, significantly expanding its market reach. The collaboration has already resulted in two new contracts, reducing the sales cycle from two years to just three months.

“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,” Stripf remarked.

As a result of this partnership, Spoon Guru is on track to increase its revenue by 75% year over year and is exploring new verticals, such as health and fitness and travel, with additional deals in the pipeline. Stripf views the relationship with Google Cloud as crucial to Spoon Guru’s ongoing expansion.

“Previously we were just one of thousands of startups, a tiny company out on our own,” Stripf recalled. “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.”

Spoon Guru’s journey began with a mission to make food choices more accessible and safer for everyone. Founded by Markus Stripf, Tim Allen, and Simon O’Regan, who all have personal connections to food allergies, the company has grown from a consumer-focused platform to a valuable partner for retailers looking to optimise the shopping experience. With the addition of former Asda/Walmart CEO Andy Clarke to their team, Spoon Guru continues to drive forward its vision of intelligent and compassionate commerce.