A supplier in the pet nutrition market called on our Research & Innovation teams in Grenoble and their expertise in automatic language processing
Vit2Be is a nutrition and health activity for pets within the Diana Group, in the Diana Petfood business unit. Vit2Be, which has 10 employees, has a health function through nutrition by offering 100% natural solutions, mainly powder to compose pet food. "We are a supplier of ingredients for producers," explains Caroline Ecoffard, Marketing & Regulatory Manager at Vit2Be in charge of the "Product Monitoring Database" project.
Vit2Be launched a database construction project in January 2015, working with partners all with different databases. "Our wish was to create our own ingredient database using data from our suppliers and our own analyses."
Automatically extract important elements in a product description
The aim is to be able to decipher the list of ingredients on the labels in order to better target them and send them to customers.
"VISEO provided us with semantic analysis to automatically extract the important elements in a product description, including the ingredients and benefits provided by each of them. For example, the link between fish oil and its intake of omega 3 is automatically detected. ", continues Caroline Ecoffard.
"We will be able to better position ourselves with producers, more quickly, and develop new solutions in line with the current market," she says. We will now have a stronger argument and a base directly available, even on the move."
"Until now, everything has been done by hand in research and production with raw material suppliers," she says. We were working on Excel, it was too much work. »
The project was completed in August 2016 after starting last April, and the database is scheduled to be launched at the end of September. On the VISEO side, the project was carried out by a team of two people accompanied by an expert in automatic language processing.
"All the sales and marketing people in the world are very enthusiastic and looking forward to it," says Caroline Ecoffard. The other Business Units of the Diana Group also intend to use this database.
A second batch could be launched at the end of the year, still with VISEO on the BI visualization of this data.
Finally, on the VISEO side, "this is the first time we have applied our linguistic analysis modules to product descriptions," says Domoina Rabarijaona, Research and Development Engineer at VISEO. Thanks to linguistic rules, the free text is automatically structured in a database. The model can be replicated on any type of product: food, industrial, etc. All you have to do is adjust the language rules according to the field.».