• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 6, 2020

Label Insight Monday announced the appointment of Todd Morris to CEO, as he joins the company to assist in fixing a “broken" customer search experience to identify ingredients in products.

The former global president of Catalina plans to lead Label Insight into a world of search and discovery by using data to support CPG products in digital ecommerce and marketplaces.

“We’ve been asked to help improve ecommerce and search, so products are discoverable in searches such as sugar free or peanut free snacks,” Morris said. “If you try and search for a peanut free product, the first thing result you’ll get is peanut butter. This is a broken consumer experience.”

Morris said he joined the company to take Label Insight’s data and solve this bigger ecommerce challenge to help tackle food sensitivities and allergies for consumers and create loyalty for brands.

Label Insight partners with the retailer and ecommerce sites to feed their systems with attributes for each product they sell. It not only helps with consumer searches, but the site can sell attributes as keywords to brands for paid or sponsored search.

Label Insight combines package data on more than 80% of top-selling food, pet, and personal care items with patented data science and machine learning, creating more than 24,000 attributes per product.

“We look at 170,000 nutrients, 379,000 ingredients and over 5 million product claims in our database,” Morris said.

Historically, the company made the data available to consumer products companies and retailers.

The next step is to make it available to consumers. The data will not only provide consumers with information about the products they buys, but gives marketers and advertisers the fodder to support campaigns.

Morris wants this technology to support all types of search. Initially, the data was available to CPG companies and retailers that used the attributes for product labeling. “It’s the same data -- we’re just making it available in all types of product search,” he said.

For instance, Label Insight recently worked with a company that had not tagged their products as “Paleo” or “Keto.” When they did, because their products met the criteria, their online sales rose 30%. The data is uncovering new opportunities through search for CPG companies and retailers.

When asked whether Amazon, Target, and Walmart use the technology, Morris said “some of those customers are new clients of ours, but we fully envision all will use and growth their digital sales, and create paid search models that will allow their advertisers and manufacturers to buy into.”