Over the weekend I interviewed a mother of three young children about supermarket shopping. Let’s call her Emily. Emily is a loyal Tesco shopper. The primary reason, she says, is because of the Tesco Clubcard vouchers she gets, which she uses to take her children to places like Legoland.

Like many other mums, she does all her Tesco shopping online. “Going round the supermarket with three young children would be horrendous.” However, Emily is frustrated that the “same old routine” of the same groceries. “I really want to try something different, but I don’t know what.”

You would think that with such a huge variety of groceries at her fingertips, it would be different. But it turns out that because she has such little time to even do online shopping (“Sometimes ten o’clock at night, and I just want to go to bed”) she buys the same food because she goes through selecting from her favourites: “It’s just so quick”.

When we explored this in more detail, she told me that it would be so beneficial to her if there was a ‘suggestion’ feature, for example “You’ve bought these before. Why not try one of these?” These could be based on an Amazon type system. It could even be integrated into Facebook via a login, and so look at what people buy who have similar Facebook behaviours and demographics (even among FB friends).

I wonder how many other mums feel the same?