Classification of retail products: From probabilistic ranking to neural networks

Food retailing is now on an accelerated path to a success penetration into the digital market by new ways of value creation at all stages of the consumer decision process. One of the most important imperatives in this path is the availability of quality data to feed all the process in digital transformation. But the quality of data is not so obvious if we consider the variety of products and suppliers in the grocery market. Within this context of digital transformation of grocery industry, \textit{Midiadia} is Spanish data provider company that works on converting data from the retailers' products into knowledge with attributes and insights from the product labels, that is, maintaining quality data in a dynamic market with a high dispersion of products. Currently, they manually categorize products (groceries) according to the information extracted directly (text processing) from the product labelling and packaging. This paper introduces a solution to automatically categorize the constantly changing product catalogue into a 3-level food taxonomy. Our proposal studies three different approaches: a score-based ranking method, traditional machine learning algorithms, and deep neural networks. Thus, we provide four different classifiers that support a more efficient and less error-prone maintenance of groceries catalogues, the main asset of the company. Finally, we have compared the performance of these three alternatives, concluding that traditional machine learning algorithms perform better, but closely followed by the score-based approach.