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Artificial intelligence is permeating healthcare in a number of ways, even affecting the food we choose. Grocery technology company Instacart has announced new AI-powered features for users to make healthy food choices.
The Smart Shop technology personalizes grocery shopping through generative AI and machine learning and analyzes customer habits and dietary preferences to more quickly home in on the most relevant products.
In addition to Smart Shop, Instacart has unveiled new AI-powered Health Tags, which provide detailed nutritional information across the catalog, and Inspiration Pages, curated destinations featuring expert-backed health recommendations and shoppable recipes.
The first Inspiration Page was developed in collaboration with the American Diabetes Association and features evidence-based nutrition guidance and diabetes-friendly grocery and recipe recommendations, said Instacart.
WHAT’S THE IMPACT
According to the company, the Smart Shop technology applies behavior analysis and affinity modeling to analyze real-world shopping habits, identifying patterns in user preferences. To further refine this understanding, large language models (LLMs) improve personalization by identifying the most valuable signals for predicting peoples’ preferences.
Customers can modify their shopping preferences, selecting from 14 unique dietary preferences, including gluten-free, high protein, high fiber, lactose-free, low calorie, low carb, low sodium, low sugar, low fat, organic, pescatarian, preservative-free, vegan and vegetarian. Customers can explicitly share household details, like whether they’re also shopping for a baby, toddler or pet.
At the same time, the Health Tag system scans product data at scale to extract key nutrition characteristics. This multimodal AI platform leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to extract product attributes from text and images to enable rapid tagging of nutrition claims, ingredients and dietary labels.
Using this model, Instacart said it has tagged more than 1.3 billion data points across food and beverage products in its catalog.
Inspiration Pages are intended to help customers find foods that align with their health goals. Instacart plans to continue expanding Inspiration Pages, launching new shoppable experiences based on Smart Shop preferences like high fiber and high protein, and partnering with additional organizations to bring more expert-backed guidance onto the platform.
THE LARGER TREND
A 2019 study by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in collaboration with investigators at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, found that suboptimal diet costs approximately $300 per person, or $50 billion nationally, accounting for 18% of all heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes costs in the country.
A prescription for healthy food could not only improve patients’ health but also save more than $100 billion in healthcare costs, according to a study published in the Public Library of Science.
Such prescriptions can improve health outcomes for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries, and the findings showed that the predicted economic benefits would be realized if 20% of the cost of supermarket fruits and vegetables were covered through Medicare and Medicaid — dubbed the “F&V incentive.”
Under an alternate scenario, the “healthy food incentive,” 30% of the cost of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts/seeds, plant-based oils and seafood would be covered.
That’s not the first time food has been viewed as a means of achieving potential cost savings. Prior research has shown that meal delivery programs, such as Meals on Wheels, reduce the cost of healthcare in dually eligible Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. Food has also been proposed as a possible means of cutting treatment costs for diabetes patients.
Jeff Lagasse is editor of Healthcare Finance News.
Email: [email protected]
Healthcare Finance News is a HIMSS Media publication.
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