Startup Idea: Competitive Analysis Software for Food Businesses

Startup idea to create a database application for brand managers in the food industry. The proposed system will be able to pull, sort, and match data from competitive products (ingredients, nutrition and pricing) that can be used when creating a P/L for a new product to determine its price and margin.

I work in brand management for a food company. It's always been challenging pulling competitive data for similar products when creating a P/L for a new item. For new items, we obviously take COGS into account when determining a price. However, when establishing our margin, we also look at similar items in the market. While one can use IRI to pull current prices, it takes a lot of legwork to actually look up the competitor products first to see if they actually are similar. For example: we want to introduce a seafood seasoning that contains 12 spices/herbs that has a flavor profile of X. When I pull IRI data for seafood seasonings, some items called "seafood" may contain 20% of the same ingredients as ours, other may be 90% similar to ours. The latter items would need to be weighted more heavily for our pricing analysis. Essentially, it would be helpful to have a database that logs all nutrition labels with ingredient statements for our competitors' products that we could access when creating our pricing.