Who says the recipe is dead?
Definitely not Amazon. Last week the tech giant teamed with Fexy Media, a food media company that owns such brands as Simply Recipes and Serious Eats, to integrate one-click shopping into recipes. According to a report in Progressive Grocer, Prime members will be able to click a buy button within the recipe that allows them to instantly add the ingredients to a shopping cart, which will then be delivered within hours by Amazon’s same-day delivery service, Prime Now. According to the post, the new shop-by-recipe service is available across “tens of thousands of items” on Prime Now.
It’s an intriguing move for Amazon, who as I wrote last week, first started looking at shop-by-recipe technology as early as 2011. That’s when the company first filed a patent application entitled “Automatic item selection and ordering based on recipe.” Amazon was eventually issued patent in 2015. Not surprisingly, when you compare the mockup in the patent to the implementation with Fexy, they pretty much look the same:
This isn’t the first effort to connect the recipe to a virtual grocery shopping cart. Swedish startup Northfork is working with the largest grocery store in Sweden in Coop as well as the country’s largest retailer ICA to offer one-click grocery cart integration with recipes as well as personalized meal kits. According to Northfork, recipe driven sales now account for one in five orders online for Coop.
Seattle-based Fexy is an interesting partner for Amazon. The company, co-CEO’d by the husband and wife team of Cliff and Lisa Sharples, has been rolling up established food sites over the last few years such as Serious Eats (and Kenji Lopez’s Food Lab), Road Food and Simply Recipes. The Sharples have a long history in Internet commerce: Lisa Sharples is the former President of Allrecipes.com, and the two got their start early in e-commerce back in the original dot-com boom, taking gardening site Garden.com public back in 1999.
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