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Jumbo Supermarkten Produces Exceptional Results Using the AI Behind Bloomreach Discovery
Jumbo Supermarkten is a prominent supermarket chain based in the Netherlands and Belgium. The grocer is renowned around the world for its commitment to providing shoppers with low prices for their essentials, offering a wide range of fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, cheese, bread, and other groceries, along with drug and cosmetic products.
As the second-largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands with an employee base of more than 100,000 people, Jumbo has seen significant growth over recent years, including its expansion into Belgium. In addition to physical stores, Jumbo also offers a digital shopping experience via its website and app. Since the brand is always highly recognized for its customer-centric approach (which is achieved through Jumbo’s 7 certainties) — maintaining a low price guarantee, providing home delivery services with a smile, and publishing delicious recipes for customers to try at home —the company knew that it had to revamp its product discovery experience once it began to feel the constraints of its current search tool. That’s why the Dutch supermarket giant looked to Bloomreach Discovery for help.
The Challenge
In a world that's rapidly shifting toward digitalization, Jumbo stands out as a brand that has seamlessly adapted to market changes time and time again. The company takes pride in its ability to be responsive and dynamic, catering to the diverse and ever-changing needs of its customers.
But this results in a unique set of challenges for the grocer. For instance, the grocery industry serves a multitude of customers each day, making its audience essentially “everyone.” Not to mention, this sector also caters to immediate needs, unlike many industries where purchases are driven by desire or want. The pandemic only increased the urgency of these needs, making it difficult for Jumbo’s ecommerce practitioners to keep up with demand. Like a double-edged sword, Jumbo’s growth (i.e., increase in private-label SKUs, expansion of its store portfolio, and shifting focus areas) was beginning to compromise its online experience since its legacy infrastructure could no longer support the company’s expanding use cases, particularly when it came to product discovery.
Jumbo knew that it had to adapt quickly and invest in search and merchandising technology that would support its growth and expanding endeavors. In particular, its next search tool needed to handle a diverse number of customer and market types without being too complex, manual, or reliant on IT. The solution also had to be easy to scale, as change is always a constant for the Dutch grocery retailer. Lastly, Jumbo needed a flexible, user-friendly tool with both AI automation and manual capabilities that could deliver fast, accurate, and personalized results in line with its customers' growing expectations.
The merchandising dashboard is really intuitive compared to our previous solution. The product grid editors are extremely visual, and that’s helpful for us. The changes we make have immediate effect.
Ellen Tosserams
The Solution
As Jumbo began to outgrow its previous enterprise search solution, the grocer wanted to stick with a company that had industry experience in ecommerce. Jumbo was also looking for a unified solution that brought together search, merchandising, recommendations, artificial intelligence, and personalization, and Bloomreach Discovery was the best fit out of the six companies the grocery chain evaluated. Unlike Endeca, Bloomreach’s unified solution significantly reduced manual tasks and workarounds. And with the help of Loomi, Bloomreach’s ecommerce AI, Jumbo could effectively address its search-related problems.
Bloomreach Discovery's intelligent ranking algorithm became a trusted companion for Jumbo, with Loomi calculating the performance score of products through a combination of signals, such as product views, add-to-carts, and revenue for each search query. The brand could also leverage a similar scorecard for relevance, where Loomi determines which products are the best match for the search query. This helped Jumbo recognize seasonal patterns, like Easter or summer BBQ season, to optimize its site accordingly and align with these seasonal trends.
Last but not least, Bloomreach Discovery's merchandising tools turned out to be a major win for Jumbo, making it a breeze to manage its large-scale inventory of over 20,000 SKUs. The visual product grid editor, a significant improvement from their previous system, was particularly impactful. With merchandising capabilities like Bloomreach’s automatically generated synonyms, Jumbo solved a major pain point of creating manual rules around synonyms and misspellings. This feature minimized redundant workflows, enabling Jumbo to continue to focus on building out product discovery and personalization on its ecommerce website.
The Results
Since implementing Bloomreach’s product discovery solution, Jumbo has made the most out of its new toolset. The merchandising team got to work immediately with A/B testing different scenarios across its product listing pages (PLPs) to accommodate customer intent and drive engagement. For example, Jumbo’s merchandising team ran an A/B test on the search term “kaas” (cheese) to determine if using Loomi to reduce the product count and rank items according to relevance would lessen friction and enable a better path to purchase. The test’s results only confirmed Jumbo’s new AI-driven approach to search and merchandising paired perfectly with its merchandisers’ intuition: Add-to-cart rate went up by 4.7%, while average order value (AOV) and revenue per visitor (RPV) increased by 4% and 5.2%, respectively.
After the first A/B test with the search term “kaas” showed success, Jumbo began to explore more possibilities around common search terms, like “verse producten” (fresh produce) and “yoghurt” (yogurt). During its next A/B test, the forward-thinking merchandising team examined the impact of boosting fresh products on the PLPs displaying fresh produce. Again, they saw an RPV lift of 8.4%, as well as a 4.5% increase in AOV. The same rang true for a different A/B test they ran on boosting new products on the search term for yogurt, increasing clickthrough rate by 6% and RPV by 6.7%.
As Jumbo continues to combine the power of Loomi’s ranking and recall algorithms with its merchandiser’s expertise, its ecommerce team is slowly but surely leaving redundant tasks to Bloomreach’s ecommerce AI and only tweaking where necessary based on their professional expertise. Looking ahead to the future, the team hopes to perfect its personalization strategy at the segmented level and assist the grocer’s mission of delivering healthy, sustainable options at the localized level. Thanks to Bloomreach Discovery, Jumbo has already begun to unlock limitless opportunities that engage and delight all of its customers.
