Free grocery data in aisle two

October 13, 2011 by Dave Haynes

If whatever your company does involves screens or interactive something or others inside groceries, this should get your attention.

A company called AisleFinder has developed and made available what it describes as the “First Robust Open Source API For The Grocery Industry.

When we built AisleFinder we realized a couple of things:
1. Supermarket and Grocery product data is hard to Find, hard to Get and hard to Keep Updated. 
2. Other people that want to start companies in the grocery space are not starting them because of the lack of a rich set of data to work with 

The Solution: Knowing the weight of the problem, AisleFinder Labs Crafted Supermarket API. Supermarket API is based on AisleFinder.com’s own technology that they use to power their mobile and web properties.
Supermarket API is the First Open Source API within the Grocery space.

We provide the following features :

1. Aisle Information in over 2,400 Supermarkets and shopping Centers including Whole Foods, Trader Joes, Safeway and Wal-Mart across the USA (Canada & Europe Soon) 
2. Supermarket API provides product pictures, details and Information on over 150,000 grocery products

Pricing=Free

One Promise: There will always be a free version of Supermarket API available for people to use. Currently Supermarket API is in Public Beta, so that we can knock the bugs out and deliver the features that developers really want. Please Pardon our Dust

So if you are working with or pitching a grocery chain on some sort of product offer that makes it easier for consumers to find stuff and plan things, your development team is probably trying to sort out where they’ll get all that data needed to make something useful in demo or real world form. This would seem to be at least a base solution, and certainly a great demo resource.

Because this is free, and the AisleFinder guys stress there will always be a free version, that suggests the API is a freemium thing that gets people using the service and their company’s technology tuned to it. So when they need more, the easy thing to do is stick with the platform but start paying for enhanced data.

Stressing the obvious, I am no developer and can’t say much about the depth or quality of the API. But for folks working in the area, it’s no doubt useful to be made aware that this exists. It could save a pile of time (and initial cost).

 

Leave a comment