Katie Hotze, a digital marketing professional who most recently worked for a Fortune 200 company, used to go grocery shopping with recipes she had ripped out of her favorite food magazines, turning their ingredients into leisurely weeknight meals. A few years later, with the added responsibility of cooking for her young children and the shift to getting her recipes mostly online, Hotze found the process of virtual meal planning and grocery shopping to be frustrating and tedious.
So she created Grocery Shopii.
The Charlotte-based tech startup she founded and launched in 2019 uses machine learning to fuel online grocery shopping, making it more intuitive and taking fewer clicks to get from cart to checkout. What makes Grocery Shopii’s white-label platform unique in its space — a disruptor — is that it benefits consumers and smaller, mom-and-pop grocers, as well as farmers and others in the food ecosystem.
“We are meeting consumers where they are, which is searching online for recipes before they go grocery shopping, while also helping independent grocery stores combat cart abandonment and improve their online checkout rates,” said Hotze, Grocery Shopii’s CEO. “Farmers who work directly with grocers that use Grocery Shopii to power their eCommerce can move their surplus produce more effectively, reducing food waste.”
Hotze — along with Chief Technology Officer Michael Johnson and Culinary Director Jessica Bentley — has positioned Grocery Shopii for impressive growth.
It was selected to join the elite Microsoft for Startups program earlier this year, which provides Grocery Shopii and other “high-potential startups” with exclusive access to technology, mentorship, and business support from Microsoft.
“That has been a huge honor for us,” Hotze said of her company’s inclusion in the Microsoft program. “It came at a perfect time as we’ve been able to really scale up our innovative meal-planning software to help people solve the daily ‘What’s for dinner?’ dilemma with the help of top food brands and recipe bloggers.”
Hotze and the brand were also featured on a recent episode of the streaming series “Unicorn Hunters,” which gives a panel of celebrity investors as well as audience members a chance to invest in companies before they go public. Lance Bass, one of the show’s celeb panelists, took the opportunity to invest in Grocery Shopii, saying, “[it’s] a company I believe in because it’s changing the way grocery shopping is done, leveraging data and machine-learning to provide value to grocers and convenience to people who love to cook — like me.”
Grocery Shopii plans to have 500 stores on its platform in 2022 on its way to more than 2,000 stores and a global presence. As the company grows and adds new employees, Hotze said she looks to programs like Hire Our Heroes to employ military veterans and spouses of active-duty military.
“With work-from-home and virtual teams being the new normal, it’s the perfect time for us to unlock access to this unbelievable talent pipeline,” Hotze said. “A combat veteran is one of the top food bloggers we work with, our head of sales is also a combat vet, and we have a military spouse who runs our corporate operations. Grocery Shopii takes pride in being able to provide gainful and meaningful employment to real U.S. heroes.”
Grocery Shopii
MISSION: To create a personalized grocery shopping experience that saves time and money while promoting health and wellness for families everywhere.
STATS: 15 employees; 2 years in operation; $1.5 million projected 2022 revenue.
WEBSITE: groceryshopii.com SOCIAL: LinkedIn: (Grocery Shopii, Katie Hotze)
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