How Grocery Dealz Is Building the "Gas Buddy for Groceries" | Spotlight Series

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Hello everyone, we are your co host for today's interview.

I am Chris Walton.

And I'm Anne Mazinga.

And Anne, you know, grocery pricing, agentic AI loyalty.

I feel like I can't get enough of those topics.

They're all getting a ton of buzz coming out of Grocery Shop.

And so you know what I was asking myself and I said, what if there was a platform?

What if there was a platform that could put a radical new spin on all of them for consumers, on all those ideas for consumers?

And you know what?

I think we might have found it.

I think it's called Grocery Deals or it's a good bet that it may be called Grocery Deals.

It's a new startup out of Texas and what the team there is doing is definitely new and novel and worth all y', alls, y' all's intentionally consideration.

And hopefully by the end of today's podcast you'll be saying to yourself, huh, that is a really interesting idea.

So please join us in welcoming Grocery Deals co founder and co CEO Matt Goins to today's program.

Thanks, Chris.

Thanks, Anne.

Pleasure being here.

Well, we're so excited that we get to have you join us today.

We had your co founder Michael Waldrop on our Grocery Shop Today Top Tech preview.

We saw you too at the Grocery Shop event just a few weeks ago.

But for those who might be meeting you and Grocery Deals for the first time, can you take us back to how this idea came to you all?

I feel like I should be saying y', all, Matt, why didn't you correct me?

We appreciate the y', all, you know.

Yes.

Trying to, you know, wear the cowboy hat, represent Texas as much as possible.

Yeah.

So Mike and I, we've been long time friends for about 20 years and Mike is a serial entrepreneur.

He's come up with, you know, hundreds of ideas over the years and typically calls me as kind of a bouncing board to bounce ideas off of.

And you know, some are kind of crazy and wild like, you know, deer breeding farms to others like grocery deals.

And it's a big spectrum.

It is, yeah.

The guy's got a lot.

His brain never stops thinking.

So, you know, thankful, thankfully for that, you know, we have grocery deals.

But he called me with this idea and you know, I've spent most of my career in sales and marketing and was kind of an early pioneer in the mobile app marketing space with Expedia and Hotels.com and so he called me and said, hey, what do you think about this?

You know, grocery prices are insane and there's just not a tool out there that can help people compare and save.

And you know, no one knows exactly how much they could save by switching stores or just shopping at another store.

And this doesn't involve coupons.

It's just looking at the stores around you much like a gas buddy or, you know, good Rx.

And I had spent time in the comparison shopping space and instantly saw the value and said, I have to partner with you on this.

And yeah, that's, that's how it started.

So.

And you were in sales and marketing.

What was it about kind of your background and your expertise, Matt, and tell us more, a little bit more about that.

What was it that you were like, okay, this, there's possibility here what was missing in the market that you feel like this really serves a need for.

Yeah, yeah.

So two parts there.

First part of my background was we were envisioning this as a mobile app and I, you know, kind of one of the early, foremost in the space, mobile app marketers and said, hey, I can there, this is a good product.

I can get this out there, we can market this.

And then, you know, my second piece of the background is I've been part of, you know, many tech startups over the last 12 years, scaling them, you know, from a sales leadership standpoint with a lot of exits to companies like Twitter or Inmar in market.

And so I had played in the grocery space as well.

And I told Mike, I was like, look, I've been around the tech startup space.

We can scale this and you know, to a fruitful exit or IPO if we decide to go further, you know, whatever the case may be.

So that was kind of, you know, my background and selling point to him was we can market this and we can sell this to investors into the market.

And in terms of, you know, the consumer bit, we did a lot of research early on and you know, had found some companies that had tried and failed in the past to do this.

But we're kind of at this inflection point in the market where the demand, with grocery prices being the highest it's been in 40 years, has finally met this supply and availability of data.

Almost every grocery retailer out there has their prices out there available either on their website or in their app.

And after kind of seeing that, you know, we started putting things in motion of, hey, let's go find a data source, let's go talk to a developer, let's go start raising money.

And.

Yeah, okay, Matt, so let's have you dig in a little bit.

I want to dig into the actual product.

Product with the big P word.

So, like, where is the product right now?

Where is it available?

How does it work?

You know, tell us more about it.

Yeah, so it's really a B2C2B product.

So from the consumer side of things, we had a successful launch in dfw, Texas back in June.

Great alpha and beta learnings that we got from that.

Primarily, you know, you guys talking about, hey, this is a great app, but the substitutions are driving me crazy.

And so we spent a lot of time, a lot of money fixing the substitution process because obviously, when you're comparing across, you know, hundreds of grocery stores across the U.S. some products may not be available at other stores.

So how do you find, you know, a like, product or, you know, best match to compare it to?

And so, yeah, we really doubled down on the product itself, and that's been Mike and myself, North Star, from the beginning is the product has to be perfect.

Consumer expectations, you know, have to be perfect.

The comparison has to be perfect.

Can't just be slightly off or only matching for nine out of ten items.

You know, whatever.

So, yeah, after successful beta and rolling out our big update in early September, we're now live in all of Texas, and we've been live for the last four weeks.

And next week, we should be live in all of California as well.

And the next, hopefully by end of November.

That's our goal.

We want to be live in New York, Illinois and Florida and then, wow, who knows from there?

Okay, all right.

So that's pretty big progress, you know, in.

In a.

In a span of a short, what, three months?

June to September.

So.

So I'm curious.

So walk me through.

Like, if I'm a consumer, let's say I'm a consumer in California, how will I interact with the app?

What will I do?

You can download the app.

It's free on iOS right now.

You can continue as guests or you can build an account.

We wanted people to be able to continue as guests, to just quickly dive into it, build a shopping list.

You can search, you can add from our featured item section.

And your shopping list can be anything from, you know, one to, you know, hundreds of items if you want.

And then once you're happy with your shopping list, you hit compare and it looks at all the stores around you and then tells you where you can get the cheapest.

And it's really shocking how much you can save.

I use it, probably our biggest user, me and Mike.

Super user.

Yeah, super user.

I save at least 60 bucks each trip for my family of four just by switching.

So it's.

We try to tell people, and we're having to really do a lot of education to consumers that, hey, this is out there.

It doesn't involve coupon clipping.

It works with any retailer you already shop at.

You know, you don't.

We're not trying to replace the Kroger app or Instacart.

We're just a starting point that launches you into those platforms.

Yeah, and that was a point.

I was going to ask you about this later, but I might as well ask you about it now.

So, like, and, and so that's a really key consideration point for the user too.

Like.

Right, because you guys are essentially, you're scraping the Internet, say in Texas or California, of all available grocery data and information out there and then making it easily digestible for the grocery deals user to see and price compare across all those different options.

That's right.

Right.

That's essentially what you guys are doing.

Yeah, more or less.

Okay, so then where, so if that's where it is now, where do you see things going in the future?

Where do you plan to take things?

You talked about expansion.

I'm curious, like, why you picked those states, if you could talk about that.

But then also, where does the product go in terms of, you know, product two?

I don't know what iteration you're on, but product 2.0, 3.0, 4.0.

As the new CEO, where do you.

Envision taking things as part of the state expansion?

We're really following the money and, you know, makes sense, something we have to focus on.

And we have a big, I can't say partnership with Instacart coming out, but we've embedded their software developer kit and have joined their developer program.

So now Instacart will be our main delivery fulfillment for all of our shoppers.

So you can build a list, you can compare that list, and then if you want to go in store, great.

If you want to purchase it and get it delivered with Instacart, you can now do that.

And so that's, that's a big step for us.

And again, like we're not trying to replace the consumer path to purchase here, we're just trying to, you know, supplement it.

And having Instacart as our fulfillment partner helps us do that.

And Matt, that makes sense.

I mean that's a great thing from the customer's perspective and I imagine starts to get more and more conversations going with then the brands and the retailers that you're working with too.

Is that right?

Y.

Yes.

Yeah.

And that's exactly where our B2B side of the business come in.

Yeah.

What we're calling the retail media marketplace.

So an evolving retail media network.

It seems like every week in grocery there's a new retail media network that pops up.

And that's what we're trying to build and create is hey, we have this marketplace where consumers are actively building shopping lists.

We have custom first party data that you know, we can pass back and you can target consumers based on.

And then we have this comparison screen which gives retailers the last chance to win this consumer, even if they lost the comparison, they may have lost by $1520, but gives them an opportunity to highlight, hey, we have these other great solutions or here's our differentiators and you may not be as low as Walmart, but we have X, Y and Z.

So that's really what a big focus of our businesses on now is talking to the CPG brands and the retailers and getting them to participate and own part of this price transparency in this.

Path and what's been their response before or already when you, you've started to have some of these conversations already, Matt.

But how are they responding to this opportunity and then how are you kind of taking what they're saying and kind of plotting that out for how you envision working with them going forward?

So it's definitely been a mixed bag of responses.

There's been kind of this newer guard within retail that's more edgier in technology, front and center in and you know those.

We've Talked to several CMOs at grocery retailers that are more forward thinking and embracing AI and other things and they love this.

They, they see the, the future for it and they want to participate in it.

And many have and it's really like spitballed into man.

We can like price match.

We talked to one CMO of a major grocery retailer and he's like, hey, look, if it's a user, if it's Chris Walton, who I've never seen before, yeah, I'll price match, you know, to be number one or whatever, just to win him over.

And yeah, when I was on the.

Market, doesn't want to win me over, Matt.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah, we all know how much you're worth.

So whether that's a, you know, profitable win for them or not.

No.

And so, yeah, there's been that, that group of people that have been very man, we could do X, Y and Z with it.

We can do this.

And that's what we want.

We're early flexible startup.

We want to build solutions that value the retailers and CPG brands.

But we've also talked to that other kind of old guard that is persistent or resistant to change.

And, you know, kind of the number one feedback we hear from them is we don't want our prices out there.

And what I tell them.

And according to upside study, 82% of consumers are already grocery price comparison shopping, and that's the highest category of any other category in the U.S. fuel is third.

You know, it's shopping.

So we tell them, like, hey, they're already price comparison shopping.

They're already out there looking at your prices and your competitors might as well embrace this and be a part of it.

And the retailers and brands that own this process and this price transparency, those are the ones that are going to win.

And, you know, we saw that when I was@hotels.com Expedia which now there's over, I think, 100 plus different price comparison websites out there.

Yeah.

So, Matt, that's interesting too, because, like, as a former merchant, what you got me thinking of in the example too, when you're kind of joking about me is like, I was actually thinking, like, yeah, if I have a really loyal guest who I know, I can identify them as shopping on grocery deals or a price comparison site, and they're thinking about going to my competitor and I might lose that loyalty.

I'm going to probably do a lot to keep them, you know, in my brand, in my portfolio for sure.

So I'm curious.

So talk more about, talk more about the value.

What is the inherent value of comparison shopping?

Like, why is that such an important thing based on your experience?

You talked about it a little bit, but I want to go more into it.

Like, in terms of what you saw@hotels.com, why is that such an important factor here?

There's a lot of value in comparison shopping.

I know personally now, my grocery bill is more than my house mortgage, which is crazy.

And for most consumers in America that's the situation we're dealing with.

And anytime I buy over, I'd say anything over $200, my wife's like, did you shop around?

Did you look at two or three different stores?

And I'm like yes, I looked around.

This was the cheapest.

So I think as consumers we like to feel like whether we're actually doing it or not is a different story.

But we like to feel like we've done the research and we've taken the time to find the best deals.

I think a lot of us are naturally kind of deal seekers.

And that's what we're trying to tell the grocery industry is if you can help make this easy and this process easy for consumers that are already doing it according to the data and that's what we did@hotels.com we noticed, we had, I think it was crazy, it was around a 95% bounce rate on our website.

So out of 100 people that come to the website, 95 would leave, they go straight to Google and they type in LA hotels or New York hotels or whatever and then we lose them somewhere down the line.

And what we decided was hey, they're obviously comparison shopping.

So let's own this process.

We started scraping our own data.

We started including the competitors prices on our website as you check out.

So it would say interesting, like hey Chris, you're buying this hotel for 140 a night with hotels.com you could be buying it for 152 a night with price lines or 170 with orbits.

And what we found was shocking is that one, it built a lot of trust and brand loyalty amongst our consumers.

They really appreciated that we were making this comparison chopping easy for them because we knew they're doing it anyways.

And two, our bounce rate went from like 95% to sub 40% which on a multi billion dollar company that was hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue in just one year.

And so that's what we're trying to bring to the grocery industry.

And we're actually talking to a major retailer that wanted to do that, wanted to license our comparison engine to show their competitors prices.

And you know, we tell them like you're not always going to be the lowest and that's okay.

You know, consumers understand that.

You know, when I was at hotels.com, like there were our rewards members who loved our rewards program and they wouldn't switch for $10 or $15 savings because they wouldn't get their Hotels.com rewards points.

Just like I'm not gonna switch to, you know, Walmart for, you know, anything less than 10 bucks.

I don't want to have to go relearn the aisles or deal with the crowds or scan my own items.

You know, I, I have my own store that the deli guy knows my name, so.

But for 40 bucks.

Yeah, sorry, I'd swim.

Yeah.

And you need to know that because you're not competitive then too, you know, as that retailer.

Right.

You, you want that information, I would think.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Or you want to be able to incent certain customers to come over.

Like you were saying earlier, if you know some information about Chris and his spending habits or something like that, like, or that he, he will shift his loyalty to you.

I'm sure that makes an impact on things too.

Well, I wanna, I wanna shift gears and ask you a question that I know has definitely been on my mind.

And I'm curious how you and Michael think about this, but.

AI and searching for things like groceries, trying to, you know, really consolidate your trip to find deals, that's, that's really, you know, come to the fore in the last couple of weeks, even, it seems like.

How do you, how do you Both think about AI's impact on grocery shopping overall?

And particularly kind of the evolution of pricing transparency in that mix and how people are, are shopping for products?

It's absolutely the forefront of our mind and one of the reasons we're able to do this, AI is a big component of the grocery deals app and the engine, our comparison engine, our substitution process, even just the normalizing of data, because what Kroger calls bread and categorizes under the bread category, target, it may categorize it under bread and bakery.

And so we're trying to find a substitution for you.

We can't reference that category if the categories aren't mashed up and aligned.

So we use AI for a ton in the app.

And I think as consumers, it's going to make your shopping process easier and give you more insight into prices and different features and functionalities.

And, you know, we're seeing other players in the space do cool things with, you know, shopping lists where you can just type your list or talk your list and it digitizes it.

I believe Instacart or Walmart, I think just, you know, announced that.

So, yeah, we're seeing, we're seeing a lot of it.

And from day one, we've built in a lot of AI on the back end.

Matt, do you feel like Grocery deals is still kind of defensible against a ChatGPT shopping search or price comparison search because of some of the added benefits that you mentioned that retailers have from participating in this.

Or how do you kind of think about the grocery deals kind of value proposition?

Yeah, it's honestly something that when we talk to investors, that's what they kind of say is who's to say AI or chat GBT won't replace you in six to 12 months?

And you know, we say, yeah, we've, we've thought about that.

We use a ton of AI already in our app and ultimately, you know, there's still some areas where AI can't replace grocery deals, and I think it can definitely improve it and enhance it.

But, you know, building the marketplace, building the relationships with the CPGs and the retailers, just getting the amount of data that we have and accessing that data is still, you know, extremely difficult to do.

And I think one of the barriers for entry of why other companies and apps haven't gone this route or at least haven't successfully implemented what we've done.

But yeah, it definitely gets brought up, I'd say almost all the time.

Yeah.

And who's to say the two couldn't work together in the long run too?

I think if you think about it conceptually as well.

Right.

So, and I love, I love, I love how dug in you guys are as entrepreneurs too.

Like, you nailed it with Target's bread and baking.

Yeah.

That brings back some haunting memories of working right alongside that team for, for two years.

So, yes, you guys are definitely familiar with what's going on in the industry.

All right, well, let's get you out of here on this.

Say we have you back on, Say we have you back on one year from now.

Matt, what do you hope to accomplish in that timeframe?

Put yourself in your shoes one year from now.

Yeah, from a consumer standpoint, we really hope to have been a major disruptor in the grocery shopping process and bringing the value of all the savings to consumers who absolutely, desperately need it.

So.

So hopefully in a year from now, we're saying, you know, this has taken over America.

This has massive adoption, much like GasBuddy did when they started in 07 and you know, the gas prices hit all time highs.

That's what we hope from a consumer standpoint is that a vast majority of users are starting with us and then continuing their grocery process, whether going in store or getting delivered.

And I'd say from the B2B side, our goal would be that, you know, we have a lot of these CPG brands and retailers building custom programs to integrate with our CPG Marketplace and offers for our retailer marketplace where they can win over and participate in this price transparency and ultimately win this consumer.

So that would be.

That would be amazing.

And.

And that's absolutely our North Star and our goal.

Well, I am very, very hopeful that we get to talk to you one year from now, Matt, and you've already accomplished that and so much more.

Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today and to share more about Grocery deals with our audience.

I'm sure there's retailers, brands listening, amongst others.

What should they do if they want to get in touch with you and learn more?

I'd say start with the website.

Go to.

Okay, GroceryDeals with a Z.com all of our contact information.

Is there information about our solutions?

And yeah, we're, you know, Mike and I's email addresses are right there on the website.

There's no info at Grocery Deals.

It's just straight to us.

So we're here and we're ready to talk.

All right, well, thank you, Matt.

Thank you so much.

That wraps us up today.

Matt Goins of Grocery Deals Today's podcast was produced, of course, by Ella Siriord.

And as always, on behalf of all of us at Omnitalk Retail, be careful out there.