Pod Foods was started to give emerging brands a fighting chance. It’s a portal where retailers can source unique products from creative food companies.

“We wanted to provide a tech-enabled and transparent supply chain to help emerging brands get a foothold in the market” said Larissa Russell, CEO at Pod Foods.

Searching thousands of food brands, with more added every day.

With thousands of products listed and more introduced daily, Pod Foods needed to help retailers find the right products for their stores based on:

• Customer appeal and tastes
• Constraints such as special diets and allergies
• Demographics and seasonality
• And however else a retailer differentiated itself

“Our search was built on Postgres’s Full Text Search. As the company expanded, our product’s search needs started hitting the limitations of our existing solution.” said Timothy Wee, CTO at Pod Foods. “We explored various alternatives, including Algolia, PostgresML, and solutions based on ElasticSearch, but the lift involved for building and maintaining a first-class advanced semantic search engine was too high even with these tools. Objective’s platform offers advanced semantic search with little work from us beyond loading our catalog into their system.”

Searching the way customers think and speak. Objective Search’s AI-powered content understanding engine analyzes product names and images in the Pod Foods catalog, and understands text and color on packages and in what contexts they often occur. It then automatically indexes and categorizes products for semantic search. In plain terms, it immediately lets customers search the catalog the same way they think and speak.

Scoring a 100% win rate for search quality

Pod Foods compared search results using Objective Search against it’s own system. In a head-to-head match, Objective Search scored a 100% win rate for search quality as scored by relevance. With Kailua’s simple API and robust infrastructure, Pod Foods delivered a fast, intuitive search experience to its customers, helped them source the most suitable products for their stores, and saved the company months of engineering time and infrastructure costs.

"Using Objective’s platform meant we didn’t have to worry about infrastructure, performance, or all the different ways people like to search” said Timothy Wee, CTO at Pod Foods. “Whether you type “drink”, “beverage”, or “refreshment”, you’re going to get fast, relevant results. It’s a turnkey solution that lets our customers search how they want, and lets us stay focused on our core offering and operations. Moreover, Objective was able to support some more complex business logic around faceted search and filtering, which would have required more work with other solutions.”