Press

Halla in the news

March 11, 2024

The only AI-driven personalization engine designed specifically for the grocery industry will give Wynshop customers even more targeted and relevant personalization capabilities.

January 4, 2022

Labor and inflation challenges will test retailers this year, but experts also see opportunities like new e-commerce services, more personalized offerings and a booming digital ads space.

December 22, 2021

Retail personalization makes shoppers 110% more likely to buy unplanned items and 40% more likely to exceed their planned budget. But how does that translate to grocery? Gabriel Nipote, COO at Halla explains how “grocery personalization” is different from general retail and what great grocery personalization looks like.

December 13, 2021

In this episode, Gabriel and Henry talk about Halla, the taste intelligence company, the role of data science and ML in their platform, building a data science team from the ground up, main takeaways from their journey with Halla so far, what they enjoy most about their work and future plans for hiring into the team.

December 12, 2021

Digital capability isn’t nearly enough. Merely adding digital channels and services to satisfy a market segment may feel like a solution, but it is a direct path to economic obsolescence. The leading companies of the near future will be those who regard digital channels as their first and foremost manner of engaging customers.

November 20, 2021

Lost in the Supermarket interviews Halla CEO & Co-Founder, Spencer Price. Technology, technology technology. It’s all that the grocery industry is thinking about. How to increase efficiencies better than the shopper experience and create bigger basket size today.

November 16, 2021

Customization tools like shoppable recipes and product recommendations are helping consumers cut through the clutter of center store. But retailers are only scratching the surface of what’s possible.

November 12, 2021

The RTIH Innovation Award recognizes the startup with the most innovative technology offering and the company which is best placed to succeed in the long-term (management, funding, the retailers it is working with etc).

November 15, 2021

The ability of Halla’s technology to predict what shoppers will want to buy and Farmstead’s inventory management system are designed to step up Farmstead’s ability to help grocers minimize out-of-stocks and match their inventory to what consumers are likely to purchase, ultimately encouraging customers to buy more goods, according to Farmstead and Halla.

November 11, 2021

E-grocer Farmstead has formed a new partnership intended with Halla, creator of the only human preference engine designed for grocery, to help food retailers better personalize their e-commerce offerings by using Halla’s Taste Intelligence engine in tandem with Farmstead’s Grocery OS platform.

October 11, 2021

This dynamic environment requires that companies employ talented leaders with diverse skill sets to manage familiar as well as a growing number of new types of challenges. This reality was evidenced by the unprecedented number of submissions that Progressive Grocer received for our annual GenNext Awards program. The large number of nominees is testament to the fact that many individuals distinguished themselves during a year in which the food and consumables industry dealt with ongoing pandemic challenges.

October 8, 2021

For online grocery shoppers, experiencing a disappointing product substitution is something like catching a cold. Nobody wants one, but sooner or later, they’re bound to get one. For online grocery retailers, it can be a more serious illness. The wrong substitution can be all it takes to lose a sale, a basket or a customer to a competitor, sources say—issues that have become all the more costly with the explosion of online volumes and all the more prevalent amid current supply-chain and availability issues, all of which arose with the coronavirus pandemic.

July 27, 2021

Henry Michaelson, CTO and President of Halla, joins us to talk about their taste intelligence platform that uses previous purchases to steer online shoppers towards grocery items.

July 21, 2021

The way we see it at Halla — a “taste intelligence company” that harnesses application programming interface (API) tech to enable retailers to predict the preferences of shoppers in real-time (which drives both retailer sales and customer retention) — our small company culture is our “brand,” and that culture is reflected by what our employees think, say and do, whether we are in the room or not.

July 16, 2021

Halla wants to answer the question of how people decide what to eat, and now has $4.5 million in fresh Series A1 capital from Food Retail Ventures to do it.

Headquartered in New York, Halla was founded in 2016 by Gabriel Nipote, Henry Michaelson and Spencer Price to develop “taste intelligence,” using human behavior to steer shoppers to food items they want while also discovering new ones as they shop online.

July 19, 2021

Halla, the AI-powered production recommendation service for grocery retail, announced today that it has raised $4.5 million in Series A1 funding, led by Food Retail Ventures. This brings the total amount raised by Halla to $8.5 million.

Halla’s platform integrates with a grocer’s existing digital commerce solution to provide customized product recommendations and substitutions for out of stock items to consumers. But Halla’s platform doesn’t just rely on previous purchases to make its recommendations.

July 19, 2021

Halla’s “taste intelligence” platform was developed to steer online shoppers in the direction of grocery items they might like based on their previous purchases. But this isn’t your average recollect-and-recommend platform; Halla’s tech gets very specific.

For example, if you’ve just added spaghetti and ground beef to your cart, Halla might then suggest tomato sauce, garlic bread and parmesan cheese. So instead of spending more time perusing a site to add each individual ingredient required for your Italian extravaganza, Halla makes an educated guess and brings relevant products front and center.

July 19, 2021

Halla has raised $4.5 million in Series A1 financing led by Food Retail Ventures, TechCrunch reported. The New York-based company is the developer of an AI-based personalized recommendations platform that uses human behavior to help shoppers find the grocery items they want.

June 28, 2021

Like most other Millennial and Gen Z Americans, I can’t remember a time without the internet. My generation grew up digitally connected. It didn’t take COVID-19 to convince us to shop online. And yet, despite our comfort shopping online, Gen Z and Millennials reported the lowest satisfaction rate amongst all online grocery shoppers in 2020. We are—in the eyes of our elders, at least—“hard to please.”

June 9, 2021

As technology further enhances the retailer’s ability to personalize the shopping experience, the grocers who give each customer a unique and tailored experience – whether it be online or in-store – will see the most customer loyalty and engagement

June 9, 2021

What grocery fresh department will see the most lasting effects from COVID?

April 10, 2021

Ever receive substitution items in your grocery cart you didn’t want or look forward to? Halla discusses the use of Artificial Intelligence to minimize incorrect substitutions and how to get the basket right for omnichannel retail : Spencer Price & Henry Michaelson are in the middle of digital acceleration transformation. Convenience still triumphs post pandemic and tech drives the change. Here, discuss store layout and optimization and what to expect next.

Mar 15, 2021

In this episode of The Retail Perch, Shekar and Gary interview Spencer Price, CEO and Gabriel Nipote, COO of Halla, the taste intelligence company. These co-founders explain how the challenge of finding a restaurant for different people with different dietary requirements and preferences inspired the creation of Halla. Their goal is to help shoppers sort through the noise and expand their basket size through relevant recommendations based on individual tastes. Also in this episode, the hosts and guests discuss the changing retail landscape and the tools available to help grocers compete.

February 17, 2021

Companies are trying to solve the headaches SNAP recipients face when shopping virtually, from confusing websites to limited payment options.​

September 14, 2020

Halla, a taste intelligence company that helps grocers predict customer preferences in real time, has partnered with e-commerce platform Local Express to provide its independent grocers with an enhanced digital shopping experience for customers based on predictive behavior. As the pandemic has pushed more customers more quickly to e-commerce, grocers have had to adapt their services very quickly while trying to make e-commerce profitable.

August 18, 2020

Artificial intelligence (AI) custom-tailored to the grocery vertical offers retailers the ability to deeply personalize online shopping experiences instead of compelling shoppers to wade through tens of thousands of possible choices.

August 18, 2020

Mi9 will integrate Halla’s “taste intelligence” technology, which applies artificial intelligence to data from various sources, including 17 million different recipes, to enhance search and product recommendation abilities under Mi9’s new grocery platform, ThryveAI.

May 18, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has been an unexpected boom for online grocers. However, with first-time users representing 20 percent of the surge and out-of-stock challenges continuing to plague the industry, online grocers that want to hold on to the momentum post-pandemic face two challenges:

March 23, 2020

As COVID-19 has forced shoppers indoors, the growth curve of online grocery has suddenly accelerated, with downloads of popular grocery apps increasing by as much as 2000%. Shoppers who were previously hesitant to buy groceries online have found themselves now doing so out of necessity. It’s a bittersweet victory for online grocers who have long struggled to gain real traction.

February 5, 2020

Anyone who’s visited the cereal aisle of a grocery store knows that every time we shop for food, we’re bombarded with choice. Which product will be the best on for our tastes, our diets, and our family’s preferences?

February 5th, 2019

As part of our 50 Best Retail Tips of 2019 report, Total Retail’s editorial team spent time in last year’s fourth quarter poring over each piece of content we published during the year to identify the 50 best tips. We reviewed the content published in our e-newsletter (Total Retail Report) and on our website, identifying the 50 tips that we believe will help retail executives boost their company’s sales and profits in 2020.

November 21, 2019

Sam Walton said, “the secret to retail is giving the customer what they want.” But for all the money invested in brand and promotional campaigns, 50 percent of holiday spending is undecided or totally unplanned prior to purchase.

June 11, 2019

Most grocer sites ask if you’d like some toilet paper with your carrots. Halla employs AI to recommend products that make sense.

May 15, 2019

Halla, a startup that uses machine learning and AI to power food recommendations for grocery shoppers, announced today that it has raised a $1.4 million seed round led by E&A Venture Capital with participation from SOSV. This brings the total amount of money Halla has raised to $1.9 million.

August 7th, 2018

Los Angeles based startup Halla is combining food, data and A.I. to change the way we dine. Its Founders Spencer Price and Henry Michaelson joined Cheddar to share more on what the company is bringing to the food industry.

August 2, 2018

Halla aims to solve that problem once and for all with Halla I/O (which stands for “intelligent ordering”), a platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate Netflix-like recommendations for grocery, restaurant, and food delivery apps and websites.

July 30, 2018

The new Halla I/O (which stands for “Intelligent Ordering”) software integrates with a restaurant or grocer’s existing website or app, so it’s invisible to the end user.

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