Powered by Artificial Intelligence – Understanding Gousto’s AI

We are using artificial intelligence to build an industry-leading customer proposition

Gousto is powered by artificial intelligence (AI). We have been using the technology since our founding, and it powers everything from the recipes that customers see on our website to how boxes are prepared in our Picking Hub.

Driven by AI, Gousto is able to offer customers a truly best-in-class customer proposition. Key areas in which our customer proposition already leads the way vs. our competitors include:

• Recipe choice – we have 30 recipes available to choose from each week, far more than any of our competitors.
• Delivery slots – we deliver 7 days per week, with regular availability of morning and evening slots that our competitors don’t offer.
• Lead time – orders placed on a Friday will arrive on a Monday, versus typically one week of waiting for our competitors.
• Price – from ￡2.98 per serving, we offer better value than our competitors.

...and this is just the beginning. We have bold ambitions to further strengthen our customer proposition as we continue our journey to become a loved household brand.

AI powers our Personalisation, Forecasting and Warehouse Optimisation. Our success comes down to our people

Team Gousto celebrating the opening of our new office in Shepherd’s Bush.

Three areas in which we currently use AI are: Personalisation, Forecasting and Warehouse Optimisation. Combined, these allow us to give our customers a better service than our competitors, while also helping us to reduce food waste to a level far lower than any supermarket.

Our success with AI is overwhelmingly down to talent. We have the best and brightest working with us on solving complex data problems. Our success also reflects our culture and environment: the whole Gousto team live and breathe data, and we have rich, interesting challenges for our teams (and their algorithms) to learn from.

AI is already giving Gousto a competitive advantage, and in the years to come we expect the gap between companies who embrace AI and those who don’t to only widen. If you work in Tech or Data and want to join us in widening the gap, email [email protected] – we'd love to hear from you!

Personalisation: Giving every customer the perfect menu via AI

With 30 recipes to choose from each week, Gousto offers customers more choice than any other recipe kit on the planet. Our customers spend minutes picking recipes via an app, versus the supermarket alternative of spending hours in the aisle.

We are already beating our competitors when it comes to choice, but we want to do more: we want to show every customer the perfect menu.

To get there, we are using AI (a similar method used by Netflix) to show customers personalised recipe recommendations. This is live already and the screenshot shown is our starting point. To improve it, we will soon focus on customer onboarding to gauge early-stage preferences.

Forecasting: Using AI to eliminate food waste from our supply chain whilst allowing customers to order what they want, when they want

Avoiding the landfill with Gousto's pre-measured ingredients.

Forecasting was one of the first places that we used AI. Our goal was to get more accurate customer forecasts, which in turn would help us to reduce food waste (more accuracy = less food waste).

Getting accurate forecasts is complex for two reasons:

• First, we have been on a trajectory of rapid growth ever since our founding. From 2015-2018 alone, we grew our customer base by 700%. This enormous growth presents huge challenges in itself to any forecasting process.
• Second, we wanted to achieve the competing objectives of minimising both sell-out (so customers could order what they want) and food waste (so less food joins the supermarkets' at landfill).

Our solution was a machine-learning model that produces daily customer order forecasts. This rapid and automated production of forecasts has proved so reliable that we have been able to confidently cut the time it takes a customer to get a box delivered. As a result, we have already been able to offer customers the shortest lead time of any recipe kit company, and we have ambition to reduce this further.

(Gousto customers can order a box online and get it 72 hours later – the shortest lead time of any recipe kit company. We are using AI to further compress this time.)

Manufacturing: Industry-leading efficiency through the use of AI

Another place we use AI is in our Factory. Here, we use multiple genetic algorithms to determine both:

• the layout of the Factory
• how boxes are routed through the Factory

There are billions of possible combinations for the above problem, which is far too many for the human brain to solve. As a result, we have built our own algorithms and the impact has been HUGE: over the past two years, our Factory throughput has doubled. This reflects a sustained cross-team effort to harness the power of technology, and has enabled us to reinvest where it matters by increasing Factory staff salaries by 15% in 2018.

AI is the future. We are embracing it

We started systematically collecting data very early on in our journey. This, combined with having a world-class team who put their work into production, has already given us a true competitive advantage when it comes to AI.

Looking ahead to the future, our view is that AI capabilities can (and will) improve everything, from customer experience to business performance. We are planning for the long-term and obsessing about our data capabilities to make our vision come true over the next five to ten years.

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Read more about Gousto Tech at:

• https://techbrunch.gousto.co.uk
• https://twitter.com/goustotech

See our latest open roles at:

• https://www.gousto.co.uk/jobs