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On September 19, 2022, Deborah Weinswig, CEO and Founder of Coresight Research, moderated and featured on the judging panel of Groceryshop 2022’s “Shark Reef” startup pitch competition, which saw 12 early-stage technology innovators compete to win the Judges’ Choice and Audience Choice awards.

In this free report, we recap the pitch competition, covering its format and the judging panel as well as highlights from the presentations of each participating startup.

The Coresight Research team is attending and participating in this year’s Groceryshop conference in Las Vegas, US. On September 19, 2022, Coresight Research hosted the “Shark Reef” startup pitch competition, which saw early-stage innovators compete to win the Judges’ Choice and Audience Choice awards. 

In this report, we provide a recap of the pitch competition, with key insights from the presentations of the 12 participating startups.

Event Format and Judging Panel

The Grcoceryshop 2022 “Shark Reef” startup pitch competition comprised two rounds:

Deborah Weinswig, CEO and Founder of Coresight Research, moderated the pitch competition. She will be joined by three expert judges:

The Competing Innovators: Pitch Highlights

Coresight Research categorizes the 12 startups into three areas of innovation in retail: 

Startups: Brandcrush, Jupiter, Peekage, Shelfleet

Startups: Deliverider, Lula Delivery, Lucky Labs, Pipedream Labs, Whywaste

Startups: Promio, SalesBeat, Vici Robotics

The finalists that made it through to the second round were Brandcrush, Jupiter, Lula Delivery, SalesBeat, Vici Robotics and Whywaste.

An expert panel of judges selected the Judges’ Choice winner as Whywaste. 

The audience voted for the Audience Choice winner, Vici Robotics. 

Below, we detail highlights from each of the innovators’ presentations, in alphabetical order.

The future of retail media is omnichannel, yet only 20% of retail media assets are currently served by adtech. Brandcrush aims to help retailers manage buying social media for marketing, unleashing the unrealized growth potential for media—in-store, out-of-store and online. Aprile explained that the company’s platform powers shopper marketing across the entire ecosystem, with self-serve inbound and outbound sales tools offering optimized campaign management, supplier investment management, real-time campaign analytics, and flexible billing and collection tools.

Deliverider has developed an efficient, tech-enabled logistics service for online retailers, to solve two problems: (1) free shipping thresholds kill sales of low-price items; (2) large warehouses have high costs and low profitability. The company offers a marketplace add-on tool that enables retailers to consolidate third-party items in a grocery basket without having to hold them in stock, in a hyperlocal marketplace within a 25-mile radius around a distribution center. Customers can add multiple items into a basket, and vans or scooters bring them to the distribution center to consolidate the order.

Munroe described Jupiter as Shopify for the 30 million food creators on TikTok and Instagram. He explained that it is inevitable that people will start to shop from food creators on these social platforms, citing Coresight Research’s US Social Commerce Survey 2022 , which found that 65% of US consumers already use social media as part of the shopping process. 

Jupiter aims to offer the most convenient shopping experience through a creator-driven recipe and grocery shopping platform where the creator is the storefront and integrates with the social commerce tools of Instagram and TikTok. Jupiter has launched more than 60 storefronts that reach 100 million people, according to Munroe. The company’s goal is to reach 500 storefronts by the end of the 2022.

Lucky Labs believes that omnichannel synchronization is the future of commerce: to be everywhere the customer is. The company connects brands with inventory to enable same-day fulfillment in three ways: Shop—customers can search every item on its platform; Sell—for same-day fulfillment or pickup; and Dashboard—so that customers can view local inventory.

Gupta explained that one-quarter of consumers visit a convenience store at least once a week, but the sector deals with antiquated technology and is fragmented, with no way to get online or change prices easily for more than 2,500 SKUs (stock-keeping units). He described Lula Delivery as “a delivery company that does not deliver.” Lula Delivery aims to make it easy to deliver on every major platform, charging 0% commission and offering automating the syncing of inventory. Its customers include small chains, such as gas stations. The company plans to cover 1% of convenience stores in 2022, with a goal of 4% in 2023.

Peekage aims to turn product experiences into actionable insights, creating “customer experiences through targeted insights.” Consumers test products, send feedback and are incentivized to repeat. The insights are of high quality, vetted using AI and provide extremely fast results, according to Zabihi. The company possesses an audience network of more than 4 million consumers, generating more than 5 million data points.   

Pipedream aims to offer quick delivery times at a low cost by using an underground logistics network of pipes and autonomous delivery robots that travel near to consumers within five minutes. The pipes use existing utilities conduits, which do not require the digging of trenches and whose permit approval is well understood by cities. Pipedream is currently performing pilot testing of its network in Atlanta, Georgia.

Promio.io aims to reduce the amount of time sales teams spend on administrative tasks, which can amount to two to three hours per day, to increase the productivity of sales and marketing teams, Eros explained. The company’s solution helps sales teams to manage customer offers across channels in real time, which can result in 10 times the deal flow and 50% faster decisions. Sales teams have to use too many retail portals, and the use of more in-store programs drives a sales lift versus the traditional model comprising sales teams, brokers and wholesalers.

SalesBeat uses external data such as demographics, seasonality, economic growth, weather POS (point-of-sale) data to create highly accurate demand forecasts, in the 90%–95% range. Some demand patterns follow nonlinear forecasts—for example, higher temperatures drive sales of ice cream, until a certain limit, when consumers are more likely to stay home and demand falls. 

Shelfleet helps online brands connect with brick-and-mortar retailers to rent shelf space, reducing the costs of establishing a presence offline while improving the customer experience and consumer choice. In the current environment, consumers want it all: online, offline and a broad range of choice.

Vici Robotics uses robots to automate in-store operations in this time of unprecedented labor shortages in retail. Its robots stock shelves from their knowledge of shelf barcodes and aisles, and they possess a robotic arm that places goods on shelves. The company offers two pricing models: robotics as a service, which is favored by smaller retailers; and by selling the hardware plus a software subscription, which larger, capex-oriented retailers prefer. Vici Robotics is currently testing its products with two Bay Area grocers. 

Whywaste offers solutions to help retailers eliminate food waste and its impacts on profitability. The company started with one store in Sweden in 2016 and now serves more than 40 chains in 18 countries, including ASDA in the UK. Grådal explained that Whywaste offers an end-to-end solution to solve expiration date challenges, calculating the optimum discount price, monitoring sales, and promoting at-risk products on screens and via apps. If the food is not sold, it includes a donation platform. According to Grådal, Whywaste has helped 200 stores save $14 million and 50,000 labor hours per year while receiving 17% more revenue from discounts and facilitating donations to local charities.

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