Dive Brief:
- Label Insight is partnering with Albertsons, Conagra Brands, Reily Foods and King’s Hawaiian to power up their transparency initiatives via SmartLabel, according to a company release.
- There is large consumer demand for more product transparency. A 2016 study the company conducted showed that information on the product label alone is not sufficient for most shoppers.
- Label Insight’s turnkey solution turns a package design into a SmartLabel page, automatically mapping all mandatory SmartLabel attributes to the product.
Dive Insight:
Label Insight believes it is positive for the entire industry when more brands answer the call for product transparency.
Partnerships with more leading retail and manufacturing organizations highlight both the continued movement of the industry toward greater transparency, and the power of Label Insight’s solutions, specifically for SmartLabel.
“Manufacturers stand to gain considerably through engagement with Label Insight for SmartLabel. First and foremost, SmartLabel becomes a meaningful digital consumer touchpoint for brands,” Patrick Moorhead, Label Insight’s CMO, told Food Dive by email. “SmartLabel enables the product maker to deliver considerably more detailed information to the consumer than can fit on the package—precisely the types that consumers most desire—allergens, certifications, ingredient descriptions, and method of manufacture.”
Brands gain a new level of clarity and completeness in their product data through delivering SmartLabel pages for their products, and by engaging with Label Insight’s proprietary technology for capturing and enriching product data to power them. The process itself serves to collect, correct and unify often fragmented sets of product data into one clear, complete picture of the product.
“This new, more unified view of the product can produce a range of benefits to the manufacturer, from uncovering claims and benefits previously obscured in the data, to unlocking information about sourcing and sustainability methods which had not been leveraged as marketing benefits to consumers,” Moorhead said.
Retailers’ private label brands also benefit from adopting SmartLabel to provide this deep level of information to consumers. Private brands are often challenged to compete with national brand name products in their categories, but with considerably less marketing horsepower.
“Transparency initiatives like SmartLabel are well suited to this situation, enabling the private store brand to compete with name brand products by providing better information to the consumer,” Moorhead said. “As consumers vote with dollars and support those companies which provide the level of transparency they’re seeking, private retail brands have much to gain by developing enhanced trust relationships with their shoppers, and that trust leads to loyalty, long term value and repeat purchase.”
Ultimately, it's consumers who win the most through continued partnership between brands and retailers, and continued implementation of SmartLabel as a consumer-facing transparency solution.