Vegan Scout

Challenge

Nielsen Brandbank partnered with Foodmaestro to host their first ever hackathon at Food Matters Live 2018. They invited teams from Oracle, Sainsbury’s, Daemon Solutions and Rabbit & Pork to participate in three days of ideation and innovation to drive consumer experiences centered on health.

Teams gained access to the Foodmaestro and Nielsen Brandbank APIs and had full creative licence to develop a product or service prototype that used emerging technologies to help the conscious consumer find suitable or healthy products

Teams were assessed over the three key stages of the process.

1.   The development of the idea
2.   The creation of the product
3.   The presentation of the idea to the panel of judges

Solution

Leveraging our background in search, we used Google Trends to identify that the biggest opportunity was surrounding veganism, which, over the past five years, has become a mainstream lifestyle choice, with an estimated 600,000 vegans now living in the UK.

We found that there were around one million searches per month surrounding veganism, and that these queries fell into two major categories: “Product” and “Information”.

We discovered that the Google Assistant or Alexa doesn’t have a definitive data source to answer these types of questions, it pulls information from a diverse range of sources, some of which (such as Twitter) are very unreliable. This gave us the perfect opportunity to use for the Brandbank and Foodmaestro databases, which are accurate and consistent.

The idea for “Vegan Scout” was born – a Skill and Action that could ensure Vegans were always reliably informed about their food and lifestyle choices.

We developed the Alexa Skill and Google Action which would answer the most popular questions and suggest products, it conducted a conversation, which ended with reading out products from the database.

The action would be available to consumers both at home, through smart speakers, and on the move, through assistants integrated with mobile devices.

Having made the skill, we also devised a revenue strategy, highlighting three distinct ways in which Vegan Scout could be monetised:

1.   Promoted Products
2.   Affiliate Links to Supermarkets
3.   Skill to Skill Commission

We also suggested five possible expansions to Vegan Scout, proving the scalability of the idea:

1.   Order by ratings
2.   Top 10s
3.   Recipes
4.   Sharing Mechanisms
5.   Samples/Coupons

Results

Rabbit & Pork won the first ever Health-e-hack, beating teams from Oracle, Sainsbury’s and Daemon Solutions. We were presented with the trophy, and one year’s free access to the Foodmaestro and Nielsen Brandbank Databases.

Testimonials

“We felt this particular team (Rabbit & Pork) basically smashed every category we had in terms of measurement” Sarah Sleet, CEO, Coeliac UK

“Rabbit & Pork’s ability to bring together voice technology, product recommendations for the increasingly popular vegan lifestyle, and an impressive go-to-market strategy set the standards high” Amy Dunning, Senior Marketing Executive, Nielsen Brandbank

“As a very recently launched agency we were honoured to have been awarded the trophy, especially when competing against the likes of Oracle, Sainsbury’s and Daemon Solutions.” John Campbell, MD, Rabbit & Pork