About

Mama Earth is Ontario’s largest independent online grocer delivering to thousands of homes each week. The company sources directly from dozens of Ontario farms, processors and other makers. Mama Earth’s e-commerce delivery service operates under the banner Mama Earth Organics and serves thousands of homes each week. The company prioritizes buying from local, organic growers and processors strengthening people’s connections to where their food comes from. Mama Earth provides a critical path to market for these largely independent family-owned businesses.

Project

In this project supported by the Development and Commercialization program, Mama Earth will strategically develop, integrate, and accelerate their work with Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML) and Cybersecurity, two critical technologies foundational to the solution. Utilizing the University of Ottawa/IBM CyberRange TDS, the company is building a robust, intelligent, and secure platform for their clients to access.

Impact

The project outcome will be software that will allow Mama Earth the ability to personalize a customer’s weekly subscription to reduce the effort required by them to get what they’d like each week. Through this personalization, the company will be able to increase customer satisfaction and therefore the lifetime value of each customer. This will also improve the ability to forecast demand by having greater certainty around future customer behaviour on the platform.  As a result of these improvements, the company forecasts an increase of revenue of up to $10M and the hiring of up to 30 full-time employees in the next three years.