Project Summary
Supermaty is a unique Dutch platform that completely changes the way we buy our groceries. Rather than making you search for individual products one by one, it offers a custom "Shopping Bag" approach.
Imagine getting a specific meal plan from a personal trainer at the gym. Supermaty brings that same level of care to your digital shopping. You don't have to spend time figuring out what you need; the app does the hard work for you.
When you first sign up, the platform asks a few easy questions about your daily habits, personal goals, and tastes. Using your answers, it immediately builds a customized grocery cart just for you. This turns the normally boring task of buying food into a smart, lifestyle-friendly experience right from the very first day.
About the Client
Our client is an innovative startup from the Netherlands who spotted a clear missing link in the European grocery space. While today's shoppers are highly focused on their food habits—whether it's managing allergies, tracking calories, or buying ethically—traditional supermarkets aren't designed to easily filter products this way.
To fix this, they envisioned a seamless connection between personal health targets and the grocery checkout. They wanted to create an application where you can simply pick a fitness goal or diet plan, and immediately receive a complete cart of the right ingredients. This completely eliminates the hassle of reading labels, doing calculations, or hunting down specific items in the store.
Challenge
Developing this platform was much more than just designing a typical website. Our biggest task was collecting and organizing a massive amount of restricted information. We had to overcome a few tough roadblocks:
Closed Supermarket Data: Dutch grocery chains keep their product information strictly private and do not offer open APIs for outside developers. Because of this, we had to invent our own methods to accurately link a product's name with its exact ingredients and nutritional details, since the stores wouldn't simply hand that data over.
Connecting Private Labels: Almost every grocery store sells its own branded items. Normally, a software system sees "Supermarket A's Oats" and "Supermarket B's Oats" as completely unrelated products. We had to train our platform to recognize that these are actually the same type of food, allowing shoppers to easily compare prices across different shops.
Calculating Real-World Portions: A meal plan might require just 50 grams of peanut butter, but the supermarket only sells it in a 350-gram jar. We needed to build a smart conversion tool that smoothly translates exact recipe measurements into the actual package sizes you pick off the shelf.
Solution
The Supermaty project successfully moved from a complex idea to a working Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
- Proof of Concept: We proved that a personalised, lifestyle-based shopping experience is possible and functional.
- Technical Victory: We successfully acquired data from the hardest sources, a feat many other developers had failed to achieve.
- Savings for Users: Users can now instantly see which supermarket is cheaper for their specific diet plan, saving them money on every shop.
- Massive Data Handling: The system currently manages 200,000 highly detailed products with real-time updates, proving the architecture is stable and scalable.
- Legal & Safe: We ensured that all data-gathering methods were legally compliant and sustainable for the long term.
Outcome
The Supermaty project successfully evolved from a highly complex concept into a fully functional, user-friendly platform. Through this launch, we achieved several key milestones:
A Proven Concept: The Birad team delivered a practical, working application that makes a truly personalized, lifestyle-driven shopping experience a reality.
Unlocking Restricted Data: We successfully bypassed traditional information barriers by securing access to product data from the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands.
Smarter Spending: Shoppers can now easily stick to their specific dietary plans while saving money, using a system that adapts to both their budget and daily habits.
Managing Retail Big Data: Supermaty currently processes and actively updates highly detailed information for over 200,000 individual food items. Furthermore, we ensured that all data collection remains secure, stable, and fully compliant with strict European data privacy regulations.