BetterBasket (YC W24)

Excited to share our case study with Supermercados Econo, where BetterBasket (YC W24)'s product led to a 7% revenue increase and saved countless hours of manual work! Supermercados Econo is the largest grocery chain in Puerto Rico, with 65 stores totalling $1.6 billion in annual sales. In a time of rising costs, consumer insights director Juancarlos Rosario and buyer Alfonso Wong Moy were stuck between a rock and a hard place: raise prices and risk losing their customer base, or take a margin hit? BetterBasket helped Econo enable quick, strategic decisions by not only alerting category managers on how competition was changing item prices in real-time, but also how to react in a prompt and intelligent way. Hear from Juancarlos and Alfonso and see our case study linked in the comments below. Stay tuned as we share more of our work with independent grocers around the world, and catch us in action at the CGA Strategic Conference (Sep 29 - Oct 1) and Groceryshop (Oct 7 - Oct 10)!

That’s a wrap on Groceryshop 2024! BetterBasket (YC W24) was proud to sponsor this year’s event and showcase the industry’s first fully integrated pricing solution. The demand for advanced pricing technologies continues to grow, but we heard clearly that getting the 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗲, 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗳 is what really counts. Below are some of our takeaways from the convention: 🧩 In the keynote, Ahold Delhaize highlighted how live pricing adjustments using digital shelf labels with a real-time data feed helped reduce food waste. Like this example, the future of retail will rely on fully integrated solutions, moving away from third-party software patched together with off-the-shelf hardware. 💡 Some suppliers now ask retailers to "educate the consumer" on new technology. We believe it's better to align customer preferences and behavior with grocer operations, rather than simply making price tags bigger, brighter, and more confusing. ⚖️ Grocers are looking for something more than a cost-plus strategy, but a black box with opaque inputs is often impractical. An approach that enhances traditional pricing rules with intelligence, using historical sales data to categorize items or advanced methods to determine item relationships and line logic, is often most appropriate. BetterBasket’s pricing solution seamlessly adapts to your goals and customer needs by integrating market data, pricing optimization, and digital shelf labels to deliver real-time, intelligent prices directly to your shelves. See you at next year's Groceryshop—unless you're joining us in Vegas for our 2025 product launch at NGA in February!

One in five items purchased in U.S. grocery stores today is a private label product—brands like “Good & Gather” or “Great Value” that are owned by retailers. While these private label lines are designed to offer competitive price points, retailers often face challenges when it comes to pricing them against competitor products. Unlike national brands, private labels are unique to each retailer, making traditional benchmarking ineffective. BetterBasket solves this problem with its advanced product matching algorithm, which leverages entity recognition to map subtle similarities between private label products. Our system identifies comparable items, pinpointing both substitutes and complements, and establishing apples-to-apples relationships across different store brands. By automating this process, BetterBasket helps grocers save hours of manual work, allowing them to benchmark private label prices more efficiently and accurately.

Which popular items did Target recently slash prices on and why? After years of rising costs, retailers have responded to consumer fatigue by cutting costs on essential items, with Target’s move to decrease prices on 5,000 items following Walmart’s reduction earlier in the summer. Target has focused on essential grocery and household items, while Walmart specifically highlighted eggs, apples, and deli snacks. For grocers, understanding positioning against competitors down to the item level is critical to customer price image. At BetterBasket (YC W24), our database helps you automatically find the right comparison set for every SKU in your inventory, then track pricing over time so you can proactively react to price movements. Mark your calendars for an exciting launch at Groceryshop this October. BetterBasket is unveiling a completely integrated product that automates shelf pricing like never before. Stay tuned for more details!

Exciting news! After wrapping up Y Combinator, we had the pleasure of visiting our customer Supermercados Econo Inc in Humacao and Carolina, the leading grocery chain in Puerto Rico. Most stores currently face labor shortages, making it tougher to respond to unpredictable market changes. However, reacting quickly is critical in order to satisfy a value-conscious customer base, especially amidst recent price volatility and inflation. Our AI powered systems have helped Econo understand and anticipate market shifts, saving upwards of 20 hours per week per store. No longer do pricing teams need to go through the painful process of collecting and sifting through multiple sources of information and then manually making pricing decisions item-by-item. Our systems surface the most relevant variables as well as recommendations, empowering teams to proactively and automatically adapt pricing to delight customers. BetterBasket enables unprecedented automation with our pricing software for grocers. Contact us at founders@betterbasket.ai to learn more!

BetterBasket (YC W24) is the first end-to-end pricing solution for grocers— built from the founders' (Leon Zhang and Vagelis Viskadouros) experience launching Uber’s grocery platform. With prices more volatile than ever, 95% of American consumers are changing their shopping habits. Grocers need data-driven recommendations to keep up, and BetterBasket is already optimizing prices with retailers across North America and LatAm to increase margins and sell-through. BetterBasket collects pricing and product info and uses a matching algorithm, powered by AI and computer vision methods, to create an up-to-date and accurate centralized product repository. This database allows them to generate “apples to apples” price comparisons across merchants, geographies, and categories. Their algorithms then produce automated pricing recommendations tailored to their customers’ unique strategies and targets to achieve the optimal outcome based on current conditions. Congrats on the launch, Leon and Vagelis!

We’re going to San Francisco! We’re proud to announce that BetterBasket has been accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 cohort. Y Combinator (YC) is the world’s top accelerator program, with a <1% acceptance rate in the latest batch and boasting alumni companies such as Instacart and Airbnb. YC’s support and resources accelerates us towards our vision of creating world-class tools to serve the food and beverage industry. To do this, we’ll be heads-down building through 2024, marrying cutting edge technology with our on-the-ground domain expertise to provide best-in-class software and insights for our partners. There’s never been a more critical time to improve your margins and generate incremental sell-through by leveraging data. Reach out to us at founders@betterbasket.ai to learn more - we can’t wait to show you what we’re building.