The generic becomes a card
Someone who types "milk" isn't looking for a brand. Turning the generic into a card of its own, with hundreds of products that had to be separated without mixing what shouldn't mix.
When someone types “milk” into the list, they aren’t asking for a brand: they’re asking for milk, and they want to see every option and choose. Until now, Nada Menos handled that halfway, by grouping what it found. This milestone gave the generic a card of its own: a single “Milk” that gathers every brand and presentation, and from which come the axes someone uses to narrow down what they want.
The hard part wasn’t creating the card; it was deciding where one ends and the next begins. Peanut butter and almond butter are both butters, but they aren’t the same. Natural peanuts don’t merge with salted snack peanuts. Searching “coca cola” has to bring Coca-Cola, not Inca Kola, even though they’re in the same soda family. Every one of those borders gets decided one at a time, and with hundreds of products per card, an error of judgment multiplies.
I worked in batches: first I measured where the catalog stood, then defined fifty bases at a time, reviewed them, and measured again before moving on. By the end there were nearly six hundred, and every batch left a record of what was done and what was set aside. I also tied the recipes and the sample shopping trip to those cards, so a future reorganization can’t break what already works.
With the data in order and a new interface, what remained was the part that usually costs the most: deciding what to take out.