Unlocking Revenue by Optimizing Menu Prices with Competitor Insights
Client Overview
The client is a large multinational corporation with a diverse range of services, one of which is an online food delivery platform. With its dynamic pricing strategies, the client competes with numerous other establishments in a highly competitive market. The client seeks to optimize pricing strategies and sales coverage by leveraging competitor data, matching menus, and refining its offerings based on actionable insights.
The Science of Pricing: Building a Data-Driven Blueprint for Competitive Advantage
Unified Data Flow
Automate the ingestion of competitor and in-store menus to capture and compare pricing data continuously.
Intelligent Price Mapping
Deploy advanced matching algorithms to pair identical or similar items across thousands of restaurant menus, uncovering price disparities and sales coverage.
Insightful Metrics
Build mechanisms to calculate key indicators- price parity, matched-item sales coverage, and competitor alignment- for precise, real-time analysis.
Automated Data Pipelines
Enable seamless ingestion of competitor and in-store menus with AWS S3 and Google Drive integrations.
NLP-Powered Matching
Implement restaurant and menu-item matching using natural language processing to ensure accurate comparisons.
Quality & Alerts
Establish data-quality checks with automated notifications to maintain reliability.
Interactive Intelligence
Deliver a Looker Studio dashboard that visualizes price parity, coverage, and other critical metrics for swift, informed pricing decisions.
Untangling the Data Maze: Tackling Schema Chaos and Processing Delays
The project faced significant hurdles as diverse data sources came with inconsistent formats and massive volumes.
Fragmented Data Structures
Ingesting data from multiple sources was complex due to inconsistent schemas, which led to frequent failures in downstream pipelines.
Processing Bottlenecks
The large volume of data, combined with NLP-based menu matching, resulted in long processing times, slowing overall pipeline execution.
Solutions Engineered: Building a Smarter Pricing Ecosystem
To transform complex, high-volume data into clear pricing intelligence, the team delivered a complete, end-to-end solution, from ingestion to insight, purpose-built for scale, speed, and accuracy.
Automated Data Pipelines
- Ingested competitor and client menu data into a Hive Data Lake using PySpark.
- Partitioned data by key dimensions and stored it in Parquet format for efficient querying.
- Integrated AWS S3 and Google Drive for seamless, reliable storage and data exchange.
Intelligent Menu Matching
- Deployed NLP models to accurately match menu items across competitors and the client’s offerings.
- Optimized performance with cache and persist mechanisms, eliminating redundant computations.
Data Quality & Analytics
- Embedded comprehensive data-quality checks with automated alerts to safeguard integrity.
- Used PySpark and Airflow to orchestrate analytics pipelines, transforming matched data into structured, actionable insights.
Interactive Reporting
- Delivered real-time dashboards in Looker Studio, visualizing price parity, sales coverage, and menu alignment for immediate decision-making.
Proactive Alerting System
- Built a robust notification framework to flag any issues across ingestion, matching, or analytics stages.
Challenges Conquered: From Data Chaos to Performance Power
Challenge 1 – Inconsistent Schemas in Data Ingestion
- The Hurdle: Competitors supplied data in widely varying formats, causing ingestion errors and downstream pipeline failures.
- The Fix: Implemented early-stage data quality checks that flagged schema discrepancies and anomalies before they could disrupt downstream processes, ensuring smooth and reliable ingestion.
Challenge 2 – High Runtime from NLP Processing
- The Hurdle: Massive datasets combined with NLP-driven menu matching created severe processing slowdowns, especially when comparing similar items across extensive competitor menus.
- The Fix: Introduced caching and persist mechanisms so calculations for unique item combinations were performed only once and reused for similar cases, dramatically cutting compute time and boosting overall pipeline performance.
Workflow in Action: From Raw Data to Real-Time Insights
Data Ingestion
PySpark pipelines ingested and partitioned source data into the Hive Data Lake, storing it in Parquet for high-performance access.
Menu Matching
Airflow triggered NLP-driven matching pipelines, which were optimized with caching for rapid execution.
Analytics & Reporting
After matching, analytics pipelines calculated key metrics and stored the results in Hive for downstream visualization.
Dashboards
Looker Studio delivered dynamic, interactive views of all insights, from price parity to matched sales coverage.
Data Volume Managed
Approximately 50–150 GB per competitor, depending on country footprint and menu size.
Delivering the Difference: When Intelligent Pipelines Meet Competitive Strategy
Significant Time Savings
Automated ingestion and menu-matching pipelines dramatically cut manual effort, saving the client over 40 hours weekly.
Major Performance Boost
End-to-end pipeline processing time dropped by 80%, delivering insights faster and enabling quicker decision-making.
Sharper Data Accuracy
Continuous quality checks and real-time alerts ensured clean, reliable data flows, reducing errors in pricing and menu-matching outputs.
Smarter Business Intelligence
A fully automated monthly KPI dashboard eliminated reporting delays and gave the business real-time visibility into price parity and sales coverage.
Actionable Pricing Optimization
Competitor-driven insights revealed pricing mismatches, empowering the client to fine-tune pricing strategies, expand sales coverage, and improve margins.
About Indium
Indium is an Al-driven digital engineering company that helps enterprises build, scale, and innovate with cutting-edge technology. We specialize in custom solutions, ensuring every engagement is tailored to business needs with a relentless customer-first approach. Our expertise spans Generative Al, Product Engineering, Intelligent Automation, Data & Al, Quality Engineering, and Gaming, delivering high-impact solutions that drive real business impact.
With 5,000+ associates globally, we partner with Fortune 500, Global 2000, and leading technology firms across Financial Services, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Retail, and Technology-driving impact in North America, India, the UK, Singapore, Australia, and Japan to keep businesses ahead in an Al-first world.
