Today Allrecipes announced they have embedded AmazonFresh shopping capability into their top recipes.
The new integration allows home cooks to purchase ingredients from within the recipe and have them delivered same day via AmazonFresh. The “buy this recipe now” button can be seen in the screenshot of the Allrecipes app below:
Allrecipes recipe with a “buy this recipe now” button
To pull this off, AmazonFresh created a custom API that allows Allrecipes to access the online grocer’s ASIN number database. ASINs are alphanumeric 10 digit code Amazon assigns each product it sells. For each recipe, Allrecipes maps a list of suggested ingredients by ASIN utilizing Allrecipes Groceryserver technology and send that list back to AmazonFresh to create a customized, recipe-specific landing page.
Allrecipes has offered shoppable recipes through its Groceryserver technology – which it acquired in 2015 – for over three years. However, the partnership with AmazonFresh marks the first time the recipe publisher has integrated with an e-commerce provider for direct home delivery.
For Amazon, this continues a trend of the company pushing deeper into the consumer buying decision by embedding themselves directly in the recipe. Last week another publisher, food media company Fexy, announced they had integrated Amazon Prime Now into the recipes of their publications such as SeriousEats. The deal with Allrecipes now allows Amazon customers to access customized recipe driven ingredient delivery from the e-commerce company’s home grocery delivery service.
Meal Kits Go Custom
The push into the recipe by Amazon isn’t surprising since the company first showed signs it was investigating the idea in 2011 when it filed for a patent for shoppable recipes. The patent was awarded to the company in 2015.
By embedding itself directly into recipes, Amazon is, in essence, offering consumers the ability to create customized meal kits on demand. The idea of real-time meal kit creation is probably a frightening one for Blue Apron and other meal kit companies who rely on a model where the consumer must pick from a limited number of predefined meal kits a week or so in advance. Through this partnership and same day delivery, Amazon is allowing consumers to create meal kits around their recipes rather than telling the consumer what recipe they should make.
Solution For ‘Center Of The Store’ Problem?
For Allrecipes, the deal gives potential food brand partners strong incentive to work with the company since the recipe site can now directly influence what goes into a consumer’s shopping basket on AmazonFresh. For example, if a consumer is making chocolate chip cookies, the AmazonFresh landing page may have Gold Medal Flour and Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chips specifically because those brands have done deals with Allrecipes. While the consumer will be given the option to edit their shopping list, chances are most consumers will go with the prescribed suggestions.
For big food brands, the idea of direct integration into e-commerce purchase flow sounds pretty good given their difficult climate. The struggles of brands who live at the “center of the store” have been a widely discussed topic in recent years, and 2017 has been particularly difficult. With e-commerce expected to drive the majority of the growth going forward, CPG companies likely see their future growth dependent on deals like this.
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