Supermarket giant Woolworths Group Ltd (ASX: WOW) plans to utilise our diets and food choices to grow its profit.
Woolworths was founded in 1924 by Percy Christmas, its first store was opened in Sydney’s Imperial Arcade. Woolworths is Australia’s largest supermarket business, it operates Woolworths supermarkets in Australia and Coundown in New Zealand. It also runs the retail department store Big W. With over 3,000 stores and more than 200,000 employees it’s one of Australia’s largest employers.
Woolworths’ New Partnership
Woolworths is going to work with UK food technology company Spoon Guru to help customers choose their food, according to the Australian Financial Review.
Spoon Guru’s technology can help customers filter recipes and food based on things like dietary preferences, health goals, lifestyle and religion. Some of the more obvious categories that customers could filter are gluten-free, nut-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, kosher, vegan and vegetarian.
The technology allocates each food or ingredient with nutrition information and the appropriate dietary categories.
Apparently UK supermarket giant Tesco Plc (LON: TSCO) has been very successful with the technology, with higher conversion rates and higher sales.
The AFR quoted Spoon Guru co-founder and co-chief executive Markus Stripf talking about how 64% of the world’s population has some form of exclusions in their diet, “Whether this is due to allergy, intolerance or health and lifestyle choices, the demand for a more personalised approach to food shopping is clear.”
How Much Will This Benefit Woolworths?
It’s early days for the partnership but you can see how customers would be attracted to the personalised shopping experience that this filtering system would bring. It could certainly give the supermarket an advantage over Aldi and Coles Group Limited (ASX: COL).
Woolworths has done well since mid-2016 for shareholders. However, I’m unsure if today’s price is good value considering how competitive the supermarket industry is these days. I think it might be better to focus on the proven ASX shares in the free report below.
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