Preferabli, Co-Founder and CTO: We Curate Products Based on Over 500 Attributes

(US and Canada) Andrew Sussman, Co-Founder, and CTO, Preferabli, speaks with Robert Lutton, Vice President, Sandhill Consultants about how the platform leverages data to curate products to individual preferences, and alcobev merchants use it to target the right customers with the right products.

Preferabli is a preference intelligence engine that allows merchants to connect better with consumers by understanding their taste preferences. Describing the target client for the platform, Sussman says that it is for anybody in the supply chain, including producers, importers, distributors, restaurants, and retailers.

Most of the platform’s client base currently includes retailers focused on alcoholic beverages, but the technology works with any consumable product that has smell, taste and touch involved, and also products like movies, books and music.

“We're really focused on the difficult products where you have to smell it, taste it, touch it,” Sussman says.

According to Sussman, the most important piece the platform relies on is the notion of complex sensory products. “That's where the software and our technology have the most value to provide. Whether it's beer, wine and spirits, or whether it's cheese, perfume, coffee, tea, or chocolate,  it's the methodologies that we've created. But it's really about individualized appeal and taste preferences. It's not looking across billions of data points to try and find some sort of rationalized and normalized path between all of these data points,” he explains

For any individual, there may only be a handful of data points about their preferences. The platform uses its unique algorithms and methodology to find patterns in those small datasets and use them to feed in expert knowledge through curation.

Businesses have a lot of data on what they sell, what they purchase, what's in the inventory, and what customers purchase. But from the perspective of derived customer preferences, it all has to line up with the inventory purchasing behavior, which then calls for the need to optimize the supply chain and buy the right inventory. Preferabli provides the modeling of the preferences both as part of the engagement and also as a value addition to an organization.

 “We curate products on over 500 attributes and traits, not on if they are good or bad, but just what drives the appeal for those products. And being able to understand that at a granular level, in a way that the consumer and the merchant don't need to do it on their own, as a technical solution, we're able to deliver on our promise — to connect people with products that they're going to like because we understand those products at the core,” Sussman says.