FEATURE
Total Meal Solutions Awards SHOPPER ENGAGEMENT HONORABLE MENTION
Mariano Events Rochester, N.Y
This nationwide event-marketing agency executes high-quality sampling events for food, beverage and wellness brands. Mariano Events focuses on telling brand stories through a comprehensive, strategic planning procedure that brings all constituents into the process, from retailer personnel to buyers and sales teams. Events are organized according to product consumption habits, seasonality, shelf proximity, store traffic, and the demographic makeup of a store’s location. The agency has worked with more than 100 national retailers and 300-plus CPG brands. Using real-time, cloud-based software, Mariano Events tracks sales and item movement, event photos, customer comments, and brand ambassador check-ins. Recognizing that social media platforms are powerful tools that connect communities of consumers with like-minded brands to tell stories, the agency has a digital marketing coordinator work with brand and retail partners to incorporate content marketing and customized calls to action into all sampling event campaigns. Using compelling imagery and copy to call out key event information on Mariano Events digital profiles (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) provides stores and vendors alike with additional brand awareness that many traditional agencies overlook.
TECH APPLICATIONS WINNER
Shopii
Cornelius, N.C. Shopii is an enterprise software application that aims to solve high cart abandonment and low brick-to-click conversion by bringing the meal-kit concept to the grocery store in a new way. Launched in December 2018, the technology offers online meal planning within a grocer’s existing ecommerce platform, allowing shoppers to select a meal and fill their cart with the single click of a mouse. Each meal — more than 500,000 of which are offered on the platform — is composed of ingredients sourced from a grocer’s shelves. Proprietary technology develops a unique API with each grocer to fill a cart with selections based on pre-identified product filters like organic or low sodium. Buyers may shop by meal through a seamless integration within a grocer’s existing ecommerce platform. For most retailers, online ordering for groceries has set requirements like minimum order values and convenience charges that can derail the completion of online orders. Shopii helps shoppers meet minimum order criteria by filling their carts with meals. What makes Shopii unique among alternatives like sub32
progressivegrocer.com
scription or delivery services is a combination of time-saving, meal-planning convenience and quick-shop functionality that attracts online shoppers and drives them to checkout. Shopii licenses its technology for a quarterly fee supported by an advertising program that allows food product manufacturers to promote their products as part of a recipe.