BetterBasket Co-Founder Vagelis Viskadouros Explains Science of Getting Grocery Prices Right

The BetterBasket co-founder explains why pricing is one of grocery's hardest problems — and why getting it right matters to shoppers.

Every grocery price is a decision, and most stores make thousands of them every week — which products to watch closely, where to stand against competitors, whether a discount will pay off. Vagelis Viskadouros believes most stores still make those decisions with too little information.

"Most pricing mistakes are not about greed," Viskadouros said. "A retailer may raise a price too far, or it may keep a price too low and damage a margin that was already narrow. Both mistakes come from not seeing the market clearly."

Viskadouros is the co-founder and chief technology officer of BetterBasket, a Y Combinator-backed company that develops pricing and category-management technology for grocery retailers. His work focuses on an industry where small mistakes can quickly affect margins, customer loyalty, and daily operations.

Getting a price right begins with knowing what the market actually charges — which is harder than it sounds. Retailers need accurate competitive information before they can decide whether a price is too high, too low, or properly positioned. Creating that view requires a system to recognize when two stores are selling the same item, even when the listings do not look alike.

Fresh produce may have no barcode. Private-label goods differ between chains. Package sizes and descriptions can vary by region. A poor match can lead to a poor pricing decision, even when the rest of the system works as intended.

"Two stores selling the same apple will often describe it in completely different ways," Viskadouros said. "A system has to see through the labels to the product itself. Everything that comes after depends on that."

BetterBasket approaches the problem the way an experienced buyer reads a shelf. Its system extracts and standardizes each product's attributes — brand, size, variety, packaging — before comparing items, rather than trusting the words on a listing.

"The recommendation is only as reliable as the comparison beneath it," Viskadouros said. "A retailer cannot make a sound decision if the system has matched the wrong products."

BetterBasket's product-matching system, built around computer vision and machine learning, has reached 99.6 percent accuracy. The platform processes more than one million products each day and serves seven grocery chains, including Fairway Market, H Mart, Save A Lot, Econo, and ShopRite. The company reports that customers see an average 6 percent margin uplift on optimized categories and 14 percent more promotional revenue. Its automation also saves about 20 hours of manual work per store each week.

For Viskadouros, those numbers matter more than the technology producing them. Grocery is a results business, and a young company earns its place through what shows up in the ledger.

"Our customers do not care that it is AI," he said. "They care that the margin showed up, that the promotion worked, and that their teams got hours of their week back."

The need for precise, timely pricing has grown as grocers deal with shifting costs. Tariffs can affect one group of products before another. Supplier prices may change quickly, and inflation forecasts do not always reflect what an individual retailer is seeing in real time. A cost increase that arrives this week can require a response this week, not at the next quarterly review. Manual pricing often leaves teams responding to information that is already outdated.

Speed alone, however, is not the goal. Grocery shopping depends heavily on repetition. Customers return for many of the same items week after week. They develop a sense of what common products should cost and can quickly lose trust in a retailer that appears inconsistent.

"A grocery store depends on the same person coming back," he said. "If shoppers believe the store is taking advantage of them, they can move their weekly spending somewhere else. That creates a strong reason for grocers to be careful."

His understanding of those decisions began long before BetterBasket. Viskadouros grew up working in his family's fresh-produce business in Greece, where prices changed with supply, demand, and the condition of the product itself. There was no distance between a pricing decision and its result — what sold and what remained unsold was visible by the end of the day.

He later trained in electrical and computer engineering with a focus on computer science, then worked on grocery pricing at Uber Eats as the company developed dark stores to fulfill app-based orders. The environment was different from his family's business, but the basic challenge had not disappeared.

"We still had to decide what should be stocked and what each item should cost," he said. "More data did not make those choices simple. It showed me that the same problem existed at very different levels of the industry."

For Viskadouros, the stakes are especially high for independent and regional grocers. Large chains can build sophisticated pricing systems internally. Smaller retailers often rely on spreadsheets and manual reviews while facing many of the same cost pressures — and they compete for the same weekly shoppers.

"The largest chains have entire teams doing this work," he said. "An independent grocer faces the same problem without that team behind them. Those are the stores with the most to gain from getting pricing right."

He sees accurate pricing technology as one way those stores can remain competitive, provided they use it in a way customers can understand and trust. The goal is not to price like a giant, he says, but to make decisions with the same clarity. The benefit, he argues, does not stop with the retailer.

"Inefficiency has a cost, and shoppers end up paying part of it," Viskadouros said. "Better decisions take that cost out of the system."

For the retailer, he says, the stakes are just as direct.

"Good pricing helps the retailer protect its business while giving shoppers a reason to return," he said. "A system that ignores either side will eventually fail."

That standard, he says, comes back to something simpler than algorithms.

"Transparency matters because grocery is personal," Viskadouros added. "People notice what they pay, and they remember how a store made them feel."