Food is the greatest daily household expense. And Japanese have a huge passion for local seasonal foods. These two insights were the seed of our solution: Delicious Trend-Mapping. By creating the go-to place for fresh original information on local Japanese food culture, we believed that Zaim’s core household accounting business would reap the benefits. The data in Zaim’s 1 billion+ receipts enables us to provide an up-to-the-minute picture of the trends, sales spikes, and local passions for seasonal foods all across the country. Users know which foods are in season and trending at any given moment and can pinpoint exactly where to find the freshest items near their homes throughout the year. To further strengthen our bonds with users, we would provide access to interesting content, including amazing facts about unusual foods from different parts of the country and fantastic recipes.

Delicious Trend-Mapping depends on the scanning of receipts. By creating an entertaining and engaging way of linking the scanning of receipts to passion for food culture, our solution encourages users to do just that, increasing the pool of data.

The backend takes care of everything else. Users simply scan their daily receipts by Smartphone and Zaim’s App grabs the purchase data and directly transfers it to Delicious Trend-Mapping. The whole process looks like this:

Step 1. Scan daily receipts by Smartphone

Step 2. Read the name and amount of items from receipts by using optical character recognition technology

Step 3. Store the purchase data into Zaim’s receipts database

Step 4. Identify the local seasonal foods in the name

Step 5. Calculate the sales spikes of each food sales in each area

Step 6. Visualize them on a map

Delicious Trend-Mapping has been a huge success for Zaim. The company has gained invaluable free publicity on social media, online media and even news shows in Japan. Since the launch of Delicious Trend-Mapping, Zaim’s user base has expanded 159%. Just as important, existing users have become more committed, increasing their activity by 183%. All of this has had a big impact on local fresh food sales. Zaim users have increased their purchases of local seasonal foods by 207%. Home accounting has never felt so fun. Thanks to Delicious Trend-Mapping, local food culture is growing more popular in kitchens all around Japan!

Receipts aren’t the history of shopping.

Receipts are the future.