Halla Hires Grocery Insights Specialist Brian Murphy

In the US, taste intelligence company Halla has appointed retail and shopper insights exec Brian Murphy as EVP of Business Transformation. Separately, the firm has added Professor Alexander Tuzhilin and former Tesco CEO James McCann to its Advisory Board.

Halla uses artificial intelligence to understand how humans relate to food, and predict the items, brands and quantities a customer is looking for; and proactively recommends choices that match shopper dietary preferences and lifestyle choices. The firm says its algorithms are trained on data from more than 800,000 food items, 125,000 ingredients, 17 million recipes, and 30,000 contextual and behavioral attributes.

Murphy (pictured) joins after senior business development roles at retail analytics and shopper insight specialist emnos, customer insights specialist Symphony EYC, and customer data pioneer dunnhumby. In his new position, Murphy will be responsible for driving Halla's growth, while supporting its existing culture focused on driving innovation.

CEO and founder Spencer Price comments: 'At Halla we believe that our inside out commitment to our company culture is what enables us to deliver the best solutions to our grocery customers. We're confident that Brian's background and expertise in grocery, retail and AI, combined with his enthusiasm for our culture, will help us scale without losing sight of what drives our team every day'.

New to the Advisory Board are McCann, who currently served as Chairman and CEO of food tech investor Food Retail Ventures, is the former CEO of Tesco, Carrefour and Ahold USA; and Tuzhilin, who is Professor of Information Systems at NYU Stern School of Business, and a specialist in personalization, recommender systems, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

Web site: www.halla.io .