Grocery shopping is already a chore. Sometimes it’s hard to motivate yourself to go to the store and buy groceries on top of cooking a meal and doing dishes. But it’s even harder if you have an allergy or a strict diet. If you do, it means you have to pay close attention to everything you buy — you don’t want to buy something you can’t eat or risk getting sick.
Sifter launched to make this easier. The grocery shopping platform displays over 100,000 items and allows shoppers to search for products based on their dietary needs.
This week, the Chicago-based company announced that it raised $4.6 million in seed funding. Valor Equity Partners and Hyde Park Angels co-led the funding round.
The platform is free to use. Shoppers just create a MyDiet Profile and set their allergens, a specific diet they’re following or the medicine they’re taking (to make sure the food is safe to take with their medications). They can also create profiles for others, in case they’re shopping for a family member with dietary restrictions. From there they can search Sifter’s database, add more filters and see what products best fit their needs. Filters include things like organic-only, dairy-free, keto-friendly and so on. There are even filters you might not immediately think of, like no-mustard and immune-healthy filters.
Sifter has partnered with a handful of major grocery chains, including Walmart, Amazon, Target, Walgreens, Stop & Shop, Giant and Kroger-owned stores. When a shopper sees the product they like on the Sifter platform, they can click it to find it on the website of these stores. Sifter collects some money through affiliate links, but that means the store pays the extra cost instead of the shopper.
Sifter plans to use some of this new funding to expand its platform and partner with even more stores. The company hopes that its e-commerce approach to grocery shopping will help it grow during a time when consumers of all sorts are doing more shopping online. Online shopping adds an extra layer of convenience that modern customers have gotten used to, and Sifter expects that to continue into the future.
Sifter’s co-founders, brothers Andrew and Thomas Parkinson, are well versed in the world of e-commerce solutions. Previously, they created Peapod, an early online grocery service, and ItemMaster, a product content platform for retailers.
“With 30 years of experience in both online grocery and product data, our passion has been to create a simple, easy-to-use platform that helps people better manage their health through diet and nutrition,” Andrew Parkinson said in a statement. “In doing this we also support product discovery by shoppers who value a brand’s benefits, story and mission. I think we’re accomplishing this with Sifter.”
