FMI – The Food Industry Association selected Seattle-based Augmodo as the winner of its third annual FMItech Pitch Competition at the FMI Midwinter Executive Conference on Marco Island, Florida.
Three finalists, which also included Greenchoice and Grocery Shopii, presented their food retail technology start-up solutions, with attendees voting on the winner.
“This competition inspires discovery and offers an exciting way for the food industry to identify groundbreaking solutions that are not just transforming shelves but reshaping the future of how consumers experience and enjoy everyday essentials,” said Doug Baker, VP of industry relations.
FMItech Pitch Competitions Finalists
Thirteen contestants submitted video nominations for review by a panel of food industry judges. The finalists and their respective pitch focus areas included:
- Augmodo – A technology solution for augmenting the retail workforce.
- Greenchoice – The first carbon-neutral online grocery marketplace.
- Grocery Shopii – A meal planning and recipe media tool that increases engagement and sales in-store and online, while prioritizing private label sales.
Ross Finman, founder and CEO, delivered Augmodo’s pitch.
“Knowing where products are stored is hard not just for consumers, but especially for associates,” Finman began. “Going around searching for the products on an e-commerce order, finding some products are out of stock, it’s a lot of auditing. It’s a very manual process in order to keep track of what is where inside of the store.
“What we are doing is enabling a new data layer on top of stores. We want to track every product and every task in every store. We want to do that with a wearable technology, so that associates as they’re doing their jobs can be helped in terms of what is the task they need to do.”
According to Finman, Augmodo is able to build this out by “utilizing the existing workforce that you have today.”
“The associates are already walking around the store, picking orders for e-commerce, even stocking,” he said. “We’re able to supply them with kind of inexpensive, associate dashcams with our very limited integration.
“As they’re going through picking maybe a dozen products, they’re seeing thousands. We’re able to capture all that data and ingest it entirely passively. This requires no training for the associate, they’re just doing their day job. And pickers are routinely covering the entire store.
“You can just capture that data and provide the feedback and really quickly get full-store coverage, because your people are touching every part of the store.”
In closing, Finman noted that Augmodo provides the “hardware for free, we just have a monthly SAS subscription.”
“Later this quarter, we’ll be launching with an over 2,000-store grocer, and in Q2 will be with the No. 5 grocery store chain as well,” he said.
Baker described Augmodo’s technology solution as a “real game changer for the industry.”
“The solution uses associate dashcams to build an almost real-time Realogram of shelves to detect out of stocks, improve picker product search and improve compliance, all while being 100 percent passive as associates do their normal work – no training or operational changes,” he said.
FMI members have access to discovering these pitch winners and other technology companies on the member-only FMI Tech Directory.
About FMI
As the food industry association, FMI works with and on behalf of the entire industry to advance a safer, healthier and more efficient consumer food supply chain.
FMI brings together a range of members across the value chain – from retailers that sell to consumers, to producers that supply food and other products, as well as a wide variety of companies providing critical services – to amplify the collective work of the industry.
Read more association news from The Shelby Report.
