Oct 9, 20264 min read
FMI announced its FMItech Pitch Class of 2027, including companies supporting the food industry in AI, digital commerce, retail media measurement, workflow automation, cultural intelligence and space planning.
By: Jennifer Shawgo, Senior Director, Technology Strategy & Programs, FMI
Today, FMI announced the FMItech Pitch Class of 2027, which includes six emerging technology companies from the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, reflecting the increasingly global scope of food retail technology.
The FMItech Pitch Competition is an annual program hosted by FMI that identifies emerging technology companies providing innovative solutions for the food industry. This year’s Class includes companies working across AI, digital commerce, retail media measurement, workflow automation, cultural intelligence and space planning.
Each company will now participate in a food industry orientation led by senior industry leaders and advisors with deep expertise across food retail, wholesale, CPG, technology and operations. The companies will then pitch virtually to a panel of judges, who will select three FMItech Pitch Finalists to advance to the 2027
FMI Midwinter Executive Conference, held January 20-23 at the Gaylord Pacific in Chula Vista, Calif. Midwinter attendees will vote to select the FMItech Pitch 2027 Winner.
Meet the six companies selected for the FMItech Pitch Class of 2027:
Delectable AI (Colorado Springs, Colo.)
Delectable AI is focused on personalized agentic commerce for grocery. Its Agentic Experience Platform is designed to help regional grocers create more intuitive online shopping experiences using food intelligence, shopper context, smart commerce, targeted retail media ads and shoppable social experiences.
The company addresses several connected challenges: online grocery can be time-consuming for shoppers, younger consumers are accustomed to more social and personalized digital experiences, and retailers have opportunities to capture more value from customer discovery and retail media.
HuLoop Automation (Auburn, Calif.)
HuLoop Automation provides an AI-based work optimization platform designed to streamline operations, reduce repetitive work and accelerate outcomes. Its platform helps organizations identify inefficiencies, digitize workflows, orchestrate work, automate processes, process content, build applications and validate outcomes. For operators, the issue is familiar: fragmented systems, disconnected approvals, manual data entry and outdated workflows slow execution and create room for error.
HuLoop’s human-in-the-loop approach keeps people in the process while helping teams move repetitive work into more consistent, measurable workflows.
Nichefire (Cincinnati, Ohio)
Nichefire is a predictive cultural intelligence platform that helps food retailers and CPG companies anticipate changes in consumer behavior before those shifts become obvious in sales data or traditional research. The platform analyzes signals across search behavior, social discourse, digital communities, news, web activity and proprietary datasets. It translates those signals into forecasts, emerging consumer needs, reputation risks and opportunities for innovation, marketing and growth.
Nichefire helps teams distinguish durable shifts from noise and understand where consumers are headed across health, value, convenience, eating occasions, ingredients, formats and claims.
Portal (London, United Kingdom)
Portal is a retail media intelligence platform focused on post-click measurement. The platform gives CPG brands, media teams and influencer agencies visibility into shopper behavior and purchase outcomes after a user clicks through to a retailer’s site. That matters because brands often see the click, while retailers see the session, creating an attribution gap that makes it difficult to optimize media against actual retail outcomes.
Portal uses privacy-compliant, consented session-level measurement, with no retailer integration required, to help connect media exposure to conversion signals and sales accountability.
RETAiLABS (San Diego, Calif.)
RETAiLABS is an AI decision orchestration company built for food retail and CPG. Its ARI platform sits on top of existing systems and creates shared business context from internal data, external signals, business rules and institutional knowledge. The company focuses on the decision-to-execution gap across merchandising, inventory, stores, supply chain and commercial teams.
Rather than adding another dashboard or point solution, RETAiLABS is designed to help teams connect signals to insights, insights to decisions and decisions to coordinated action.
Scalene (Melbourne, Australia)
Scalene helps retailers maximize the performance of retail space through AI-driven Retail Space Intelligence. Its Space Advisor platform supports macro space planning across categories and stores, helping retailers make more informed space, range and pricing decisions. The company focuses on a complex retail challenge: identifying the right macro space plan for every category in every store to improve sales, gross margin and productivity.
You can follow the
FMItech Pitch Competition to meet the Class, learn more about the Finalists and see which emerging technology companies will take the stage at
Midwinter.
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