With approximately 30,000 food and CPG products launched each year, the challenge for retail and foodservice buyers is finding the right products amidst this vast number of possible choices. RangeMe’s Immediate Opportunities have helped buyers from retailers like convenience store giant Casey’s streamline their product discovery by providing a means for focusing their product discovery efforts, but even these can result in hundreds – if not thousands – of submissions.
To take things one step further, RangeMe is leveraging artificial intelligence to transform how buyers review applications for their Immediate Opportunities. By aggregating disparate data points into concise, actionable summaries, RangeMe is now helping buyers boost their capabilities of finding the absolute best products in record time.
What Are RangeMe Immediate Opportunities?
For those unfamiliar with the term, Immediate Opportunities (often used interchangeably with Limited Time Campaigns) are specialized sourcing initiatives where buyers put out a call for suppliers to fill specific needs. Whether a buyer is looking for innovative new products to refresh an existing assortment, seeking private label manufacturers, or sourcing across categories for sustainably-made items, these campaigns allow suppliers to submit their products for direct consideration.
These campaigns typically run for a set window of time, typically about two weeks in length, during which suppliers can apply by submitting products and answering custom questions tailored to the buyer’s specific criteria.
The challenge: data overload
While these campaigns are highly effective, they can generate a massive volume of submissions. Buyers are committed to reviewing every qualified submission to ensure they don’t miss a potential winner, but manually reading through every brand profile, product detail, and application answer can be a big task.
“Buyers want to review every single one of these submissions, and that can become a pretty big task for them,” says Mike Kohn, Head of Product at RangeMe. “We want to make it as efficient for them as possible to really understand each brand and each product very quickly.”
The solution: AI-Powered Summaries
To solve this, RangeMe has integrated AI tools that automatically aggregate data from a brand’s profile, their submitted products, and their specific application answers. The result is a summary blurb that provides:
- Unique selling points: A quick explanation of what makes the brand interesting or unique.
- Key considerations: The most relevant points for the buyer to consider during their review.
- Customized highlights: Buyers can even tailor these summaries to pull in the answers to the three or four questions they care about most, so they don’t have to hunt for information.
This isn’t about replacing the buyer’s judgment; it’s about giving them the confidence to know which brands deserve a deeper dive. Buyers can still read every word of an application, but the AI summary provides that critical initial reaction in seconds.
Saving 90% of review time
The impact of these tools is already being felt in the industry. According to Kohn, the efficiency gains are dramatic. “Anecdotally, we have heard from buyers that it can save them 90% of their time while they’re going through this review process because it efficiently summarizes all the different disparate pieces of information all in one place,” he says.
Beyond just saving time, these AI summaries help ensure that high-quality brands don’t get lost in the shuffle. By highlighting key differentiators immediately, the AI helps buyers spot potential partners they might have missed if they were manually trudging through hundreds of long-form applications. The result is that more brands are seeing approvals to move on to next steps from their Immediate Opportunity submissions – a win-win for both buyers and brands!
What’s next for AI at RangeMe?
This is only the beginning of RangeMe’s AI roadmap. According to Kohn, AI is becoming essential for many of the platform’s tasks.
Upcoming initiatives include:
- Trend identification: Using AI to surface industry trends to both buyers and suppliers based on platform activity.
- Supplier assistance: Helping suppliers navigate the application process more efficiently.
- Category management: Assisting buyers with broader discovery and category management tasks.
As AI continues to evolve, RangeMe remains focused on one goal: making the connection between innovative brands and retail buyers faster, smarter, and more effective than ever before.