It’s that time of year again when our annual ‘A Year in Review’ post lands on the blog, and we take some time to look back and reflect on the last 12 months.

2018 was undoubtedly an action-packed year for Erudus, with plenty of highlights like the introduction of the Nielsen Brandbank product data, more wholesale users and the continued adoption of the API program across the industry, with a number of 3rd party software providers integrating with Erudus.

All in all its been another year of robust growth and we ended the year another step closer to providing the food industry with a single source for all its product data needs.

Highlights

Growth

We’ve seen significant increases across all primary data pool metrics this year, with the highlights being the addition of 27,000+ products, which is great news for the end user Caterers of the platform, giving them a more extensive data set to draw on: –

Unprecedented data pool of product information

March saw the completion of ‘Phase 1’ for the Nielsen Brandbank / Erudus partnership, as several thousand branded products from Nielsen Brandbank’s data pool were made readily available to Wholesalers and Caterers using Erudus.

API Adoption

Last year we said the API was going to be an area of growth for Wholesalers and we weren’t wrong! 2018 saw more than 15 million products in Wholesalers in-house systems, websites and apps updated via the API, up 13 million from 2017.

A significant driving factor in the increased adoption was the news that both Lady Lodge and SwiftCloud have integrated with Erudus allowing product data to flow into their applications.

API Usage up 650%

In mid-November, we launched the ‘Erudus One for WordPress Plugin’ which utilises the Erudus API to display product attribute data on any website using the WordPress platform. Its early days for the plugin but initial indications are its been well received and possibly one to watch out for in 2019!

2018 Interesting Statistics

• For the fourth year running ‘Cranberry Sauce’ claims top spot as the most searched for product in the run-up to Christmas (1st Nov – 20th Dec).
• iPhone & iPad are the devices of choice for Caterers with over 40% of usage coming from a mobile device.

Plans for 2019

Images

For the last half of 2018 we’re been busy working on an image solution, one that will make pack shots and lifestyle images in both web and print quality available to wholesalers in Erudus. We’re really looking forward to sharing more details with you about the image solution early in the new year…so watch this space.

User Steering Committee

Feedback from our users has always been extremely important to us and most of the features and functionality you see in Erudus today is a direct result of user feedback. Your views, ideas and pain points are so important to us, and as we scale up we want to ensure we don’t lose sight of this feedback. With this in mind, we’re going to be launching a ‘User Steering Committee’ in 2019. It’s your chance to have your say and shape the future of Erudus.