| Philosophy | Food is the greatest daily household expense. And Japanese have a huge passion for local seasonal foods. These two insights were the seed of our solution: Delicious Trend-Mapping. By creating the go-to place for fresh original information on local Japanese food culture, we believed that Zaim’s core household accounting business would reap the benefits. The data in Zaim’s 1 billion+ receipts enables us to provide an up-to-the-minute picture of the trends, sales spikes, and local passions for seasonal foods all across the country. Users know which foods are in season and trending at any given moment and can pinpoint exactly where to find the freshest items near their homes throughout the year. To further strengthen our bonds with users, we would provide access to interesting content, including amazing facts about unusual foods from different parts of the country and fantastic recipes. |
| Problem | Delicious Trend-Mapping depends on the scanning of receipts. By creating an entertaining and engaging way of linking the scanning of receipts to passion for food culture, our solution encourages users to do just that, increasing the pool of data. The backend takes care of everything else. Users simply scan their daily receipts by Smartphone and Zaim’s App grabs the purchase data and directly transfers it to Delicious Trend-Mapping. The whole process looks like this: Step 1. Scan daily receipts by Smartphone Step 2. Read the name and amount of items from receipts by using optical character recognition technology Step 3. Store the purchase data into Zaim’s receipts database Step 4. Identify the local seasonal foods in the name Step 5. Calculate the sales spikes of each food sales in each area Step 6. Visualize them on a mapDelicious Trend-Mapping has been a huge success for Zaim. The company has gained invaluable free publicity on social media, online media and even news shows in Japan. Since the launch of Delicious Trend-Mapping, Zaim’s user base has expanded 159%. Just as important, existing users have become more committed, increasing their activity by 183%. All of this has had a big impact on local fresh food sales. Zaim users have increased their purchases of local seasonal foods by 207%. Home accounting has never felt so fun. Thanks to Delicious Trend-Mapping, local food culture is growing more popular in kitchens all around Japan! Receipts aren’t the history of shopping. Receipts are the future.Delicious Trend-Mapping extracts only the purchase data of local seasonal foods from Zaim’s 1 billion+ receipt database. Optical character recognition technology identifies items— for example, “Tomato”—on scanned receipts and calculates the sales trends on each food listed in our database. Data is also parsed by area of the country and time of day, giving a clear picture of where local foods are coming in and which foods people are finding most delicious. Our solution dynamically visualizes each sales spike on a map of Japan.. Up to 1,164 unique foods—vegetables, fruits, fish, mushroom and so on— are displayed at one time on this map. As the rate of consumption for a particular food increases, its icon grows larger. Zaim users automatically get their own food page, which tracks their local and seasonal eating preferences. Everyone’s pages together form a Delicious Trend-Mapping of the entire country. |