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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Alexa Adds Thousands Of Buzzfeed Tasty Recipes To Echo Show

This week Amazon and Buzzfeed announced a partnership that brings thousands of Buzzfeed Tasty’s famous quick-play social videos to Amazon’s video-enabled digital assistants.

According to email sent to The Spoon, here’s how it works: First ask Alexa to find a recipe by saying something like, “Alexa, find pork recipes from Tasty.” Alexa will then show you options, and you can tell the device which recipe to select by saying something like, “Alexa, select recipe number three.”

From there, say, “Alexa, start recipe” and Alexa will read off each step in the recipe as well as list them on the left-hand side of the screen of the Echo Show. It will also show a looping video of the recipe on the right. You can also ask Alexa to read off ingredients by saying “Alexa, read ingredients” and add it to a shopping list by saying “Alexa, add to shopping list.”

I wish I could tell you how well it works, but at the time of this writing I couldn’t get either of my Echo Show devices to actually find Buzzfeed Tasty recipes. The new feature is supposed to be available to anyone in the U.S. with an Echo Show as of this week, so I assume I will be able to access the program over the next few days as the kinks are worked out.

Too bad, since I am very curious about how well turning a Buzzfeed Tasty recipe into a more instructional/step-by-step format on a screen will work. Like many, I’ve watched a lot of Buzzfeed recipes online but have never actually cooked to one of them, in part because they seem designed more for entertainment than to be functional. Putting them onto the Echo Show could change that, so I’ll update this post once I can actually cook with one.

One thing that struck me about this integration is that it is simply turned on and available to work (once it works) for anyone with an Echo Show. This is different from earlier Alexa Echo Show integrations like that of Allrecipes, which required the user to add as an Alexa Skill.

My suspicion is that Amazon is having trouble getting people to add new skills to their voice assistants, so at this point the company is, in some cases, just doing it for the consumer. Makes sense, actually, since a “cloud computer” like Alexa isn’t exactly short on storage. That and it just seems a bit more magical if you one day could just ask Alexa to do something and she does it rather than going through an “add skill” extra-step.

I am also curious how the “add to shopping list” feature works. This news follows an integration with Walmart (via shoppable recipe platform Northfork) that allows Tasty app users to make recipes shoppable by adding them their Walmart shopping lists and online grocery carts. The Alexa/Tasty integration doesn’t quite look like it takes recipes all the way to the Amazon cart, but if I know Amazon, I expect that will eventually change.

Food Tech News Roundup: Fungi Burgers, Pineapple Beer, and Chatbot Bartenders

Summer has descended upon us like a thick, laze-inducing haze. If you’re like us, all you want to do is head to the local pool and drink cool beverages out of our stainless steel straws.

Steamy weekends are not the time for more work, so we went ahead and rounded up some news-worthy food tech stories from around the web for your reading pleasure. Bonus: you can peruse while you’re lounging in air conditioning.

Bronx Brewery Beer Fights Produce Waste
On July 30th New York’s Bronx Brewery will release a beer made with repurposed food scraps. Called More To The Core, it’s a Kolsch style ale brewed with pineapple cores and skins, which are normally tossed into the trash and end up in landfills. This tasty, waste-y beer is a collaboration between Baldor Specialty Foods and The Bronx Brewery, and is available in their taproom.

 

Capital sprouts up for fungi-based meat company
This week Terramino Foods, a startup which uses fungi to make meat and seafood alternatives, raised $4.25 million in a seed funding round co-led by Collaborative Fund and True Ventures. In a press release, True Ventures indicated that Terramino Foods has already developed a plant-based salmon burger, and has plans to create alternatives to beef, chicken, and pork with its new capital. 

 

Costco partners with Zest Labs to optimize food supply chain
Wholesale giant Costco announced this week that it would start working with Zest Labs, a company which works in fresh food supply chain traceability. According to a press release, Costco is expecting this partnership to help modernize and optimize their fresh foods, reducing food waste up to 50%.

 

McDonald’s workers are short on soft skills
This week McDonald’s released the results of its Workplace Preparedness Study, which analyzed skill development across multiple age groups. The survey polled 6,200 people and discovered that many were missing soft skills, such as teamwork, customer service, and responsibility. We’ve addressed the restaurant labor shortage before on the Spoon, and have wondered if companies will pad their meager workforce with robots in coming years. But will robots have better soft skills than teenagers looking for a summer job? Or maybe the robots will take over the physically repetitive jobs, like food prep and dish running, freeing up people with soft skills to interact with customers.

 

Allrecipes & Tito’s vodka launch Barkeep, a chatbot ‘bartender’

Ready to get your drink on through Facebook? Allrecipes and Tito’s vodka got you covered. The recipe site is working with the Austin, TX craft vodka maker to launch a chatbot by the name of Barkeep using Facebook Messenger chatbot platform. After checking if the user is of legal drinking age, Barkeep suggests a few cocktails (using Tito’s, natch) and then walks the user through a conversation branch flow that has the user ultimately choose a cocktail recipe. Once a recipe is picked and the user is sent to Allrecipes, they can then order their some Tito’s or other liquor through Drizly. You can try Barkeep out for yourself here.

Did we miss anything? Tweet us @TheSpoonTech!

Highlights From The Future of Recipes Food Tech Meetup

We had our first food tech meetup last night! And thanks to our sponsor ChefSteps, tech-brewed beer from PicoBrew, and our awesome venue Galvanize, it was a rollicking success. Plus we had a very cool panel: Alicia Cervini from Allrecipes, Cliff Sharples from Fexy Media, and Jess Voelker from Chefsteps had a great conversation with The Spoon’s Michael Wolf.

If you missed it, here are a few topics and points that really stood out to us. Prepare yourself: the future of recipes is very dynamic, very shoppable, and tastes good — every time.

P.S. Mark your calendars for our next meetup on the future of meat on May 24th! Register here to make sure you get a spot.

So what’s the future of recipes then?
All of our panelists agreed that in the future, recipes will be very responsive and dynamic:

Allrecipes’ Alicia Cervini said they are exploring completely customizable meal kits based on their recipes. They have a relationship with Chef’d to work on their vision of “making a dynamically generated meal kit on the fly,” pairing convenience with customization.

Fexy’s Cliff Sharples predicted that as people take a deeper interest in food (he said that 50% of millennials consider themselves “foodies”) recipe customization would become more and more popular. He also had an interesting app idea where users could plug in their dinner guests with all of their eating profiles and plan a menu.

ChefSteps’ Jess Voelker envisions a future where technology can help people become a better cook. She brought up the interesting concept of using AI to troubleshoot their recipes. So if your cake went flat or your food was too salty, ChefSteps could help you figure out where you went wrong. 

Voice interfaces alone are incomplete
All of our panelists agreed that, when it comes to cooking from a recipe, voice alone isn’t all that useful — cooking is just too visual. Sure, if the recipe instructions are short enough, you could cook an entire recipe just with a voice assistant. And, as Voelker pointed out, “it can solve some real problems just in time, like if you have chicken grease on your hand and need to know something.” But without a visual guide, like a connected screen, you often end up having to break down steps into even smaller steps, which takes more time than if you’d just read the recipe. 

So while voice assistants like Alexa may be a helpful tool if your hands are mucked up in the kitchen, as of now they’re most useful for playing news or podcasts while you cook. The panelists did, however, seem optimistic about the combination of video and voice. (Or maybe an all-in-one robot chef assistant?)

Are recipes just data?
During the meetup Sharples likened recipes to code, which is the driving force behind smart appliances, the shoppable recipe journey, and recipe search tools. If you’re a regular Spoon reader this might remind you of Jon Jenkin’s talk at last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit, where he made the claim that we are all eating software. 

Mike Wolf made the point that with recipe integration and connected appliances like the Joule, you could essentially have a celebrity chef cook your meal for you in your own kitchen. Sort of.

For example: you could select a steak recipe from kitchen gadget-loving chef Kenji Alt-Lopez on your connected app and your device would precisely follow his cooking instructions, giving you a consistent, high-quality result. It’s almost like having Kenji himself sous vide a steak for you, every time. (Which, for many food nerds, is a dream come true.)

Recipes are becoming more important, in different ways
All of our panelists agreed that the recipe is not the least bit dead. In fact, they argued that the recipe is becoming more important; it’s the core atomic unit of the rapidly evolving meal journey.

The hardest part, which isn’t surprising, is making recipes that tick all the boxes for such a wide variety of needs. But with apps like PlantJammer and Ckbk, plus the convenience of services like 2-hour grocery delivery and meal kits, it doesn’t seem like the recipe is going anywhere anytime soon.

 

Amazon’s Recipe Integration Bender Takes a Personalized Nutrition Turn With EatLove

Amazon’s on a recipe integration tear.

This week another Amazon partner unveiled yet another recipe integration, but this one has a personalized meal plan twist. EatLove, a service that offers meal planning and recipes tailored around personal health profiles has announced they are integrating with Amazon Fresh.

Just as with the Allrecipes integration we covered yesterday, EatLove has partnered with AmazonFresh to enable same-day delivery of groceries tailored around specific recipes. The personalized nutrition site takes information based on a profile filled out by subscribers and offers meal plans tailored by nutritionists, and now those meal plans can essentially be assembled and sent to your home by AmazonFresh.

In a way, the coupling of EatLove and AmazonFresh is similar to personalized meal kit offerings like those from Habit, only with EatFresh you aren’t actually sending in bodily fluids. For Amazon, it makes a lot of sense to jump on the personalized nutrition bandwagon, particularly as the company builds what looks to be a variety of meal-kit-on-demand services through different partners, essentially allowing them to tap into specific audiences with unique meal planning needs.

For companies like Eatlove, Fexy and Allrecipes, the Amazon recipe-delivery integrations also makes sense since it no doubt makes them more attractive partners for big brands. For meal kit companies like Blue Apron, Hello Fresh and now Habit, this is yet another ominous shot across the bow from Amazon.

The Recipe Isn’t Dead. In Fact, It’s Becoming The Center of Action In The Digital Kitchen

At last month’s Smart Kitchen Summit, celebrity chef Tyler Florence said: “the recipe is dead.”

Needless to say, it’s a bold statement. There’s no doubt that Florence is right to suggest that things are changing quickly in the age of Tasty cooking videos and that the time-worn practice of looking up recipes in cookbooks is something people are doing less every day.

But if today’s news about another Amazon integration with a popular online recipe site is any indication, I’d suggest the recipe is far from dead. In fact, it looks more and more like the recipe is becoming the center of action in the digital-powered kitchen.

And it’s not just Amazon that likes the idea of shoppable recipes. Companies like Northfork have integrated with the some of Europe’s biggest grocers to enable recipe-driven shopping, while big players like Google are building guided cooking recipe capabilities into their virtual assistant platforms.

Then there are AI-centric startups looking to take the recipe and add extra intelligence to it to make things more personalized and interactive. Companies like Wellio, Chefling and Pylon.AI are doing interesting work here.

Then there’s the recipe itself becoming fused with connected cooking hardware. Everyone from one of the world’s largest cookware companies in Hestan to the world’s biggest appliance maker in Whirlpool to cookbook disruptor Tasty are creating recipe-guided hardware.

And finally, if technology-driven integrations and one columnist’s opinion aren’t enough to convince you, there’s always old-school chefs like Christopher Kimball (check out our podcast!) who think the recipe has a long life ahead of it.

So no, the recipe is not so much dead as evolving. Instead, as our recipes become digitized and more connected, they’re becoming the center of action in the connected kitchen.

As Jon Jenkins suggested at last month’s Smart Kitchen Summit, software isn’t only eating the world, but we are eating software. That software includes whatever the recipe is becoming which, in short, is probably just better, more evolved version of the recipe.

Allrecipes Embeds AmazonFresh Shopping Directly Into Recipes

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.

Food Network, Scripps Takes a Small Step into the Guided Cooking Fray

Food Network is jumping on board the guided cooking bandwagon. Well, sort of.

The folks at Scripps Lifestyle Studios have taken the long-time Food Network app, In the Kitchen, and added a voice assistant to its functionality. The logic behind the update was that many cooks can’t easily interact with their digital screens when their hands are immersed in dough or other sticky, gooey food prep items. The add-on feature called “Cook with Me,” uses a one-way voice assistant named “Sage” (clever, huh). A cook starts by searching on his or her favorite Food TV recipe.  By using the “Cook with Me” feature, the chef simply says “Sage, next,” and the step-by-step instructions will move on to the next screen.

Yes, it is cool except for the fact the app does not speak the steps; the home chef must read the screen to move from slicing vegetables to adding cheese (in the case of Fresh Corn Tomato Salad). There is an ingredients tab for the recipe which lists everything you will need to make Fresh Corn Tomato Salad. However, the ingredients list section is not voice enabled.

While a cool, new feature, “Cook with Me” offers some ergonomic issues, especially for those who only own small screen digital toys such as an iPhone. Those with micro-sized kitchens (and less-than-perfect visual acuity) may be hard pressed to find the perfect spot to use the app without straining their eyes. It is, however, a small step toward Food Network recognizing the need for guided cooking technology.

Food Network and Scripps may have a long way to go to compete with a host of smart early adopters who has hooked up with Amazon to use its Echo voice assistant set of products to provide recipe search and step-by-step cooking instructions but they are making progress elsewhere. For example, the company recently announced it has updated its popular Alexa skill for the new Amazon Echo Show, making it easier for users to get inspired, explore what they’re in the mood for, and enjoy recipe videos and preview images that enhance the value and enjoyment of their cooking experience.

Heading the pack of those aligned with Amazon’s Echo (aka Alexa) in the world of step-by-step guided cooking is Meredith’s Allrecipes.

Introducing the AllRecipes Skill for Amazon Alexa! | Cooking Skills | Allrecipes.com

While perhaps not powered by Food Network’s roster of celebrity chefs, the Echo-Allrecipes functionality is rather robust. Cooks can search for recipes or ideas by ingredient or sets of ingredients. Need something cooked in a short time frame—just tell Alexa and she (it is a woman’s voice, after all) will comb through the tens of thousands recipes and find a suitable one for any purpose. If you’re using the Echo Show visual skill and the recipe has a video, you can use your voice to watch the video, pause when you need it, watch it again.

For Amazon—especially with its recent Whole Foods bid—guided, interactive cooking is one more weapon in the home grocery delivery business. “Allrecipes, I’d like to make a soufflé….Wait, I don’t have any eggs…Please send me over a dozen Grade A-s.” Within 30 minutes, Amazon Fresh pulls up to my house. You get the picture.

As with anything that Amazon touches, the data is as important as any element of the applications. It’s not clear what data-sharing agreement exists between publisher Meredith and the Seattle digital retailer. The opportunity for the home cook asking for recipes can yield significant data Amazon could use to sell. This could range from cookware and small appliances to specialty food products.

Google Home is not without its recipe skills. The search engine giant has teamed up with Bon Appetit, The New York Times and Food Network to amass a cache of around five million recipes.

And of course, there’s always Microsoft’s Cortana. Having just quietly launched their own hardware product, the software giant across Lake Washington from Amazon can’t be left out of the picture entirely. At the time of the launch of the Invoke in May, The company has five AI skills that are food related, with guided cooking offered via Food Network, Cook.ai and mixology from Bartender.

Allrecipes And Others Leveraging Amazon For Guided Cooking Efforts

Allrecipes, one of the web’s original food and recipe pioneers, is making yet another move into the smart kitchen.

And not surprisingly, the nearly twenty-year-old company has once again partnered up with crosstown online commerce giant and newly minted grocery store chain operator Amazon to do so.

This week Allrecipes announced it is one of the first companies to launch a video skill for cooking. The company’s new Alexa video skill fuses video and photos with step-by-step instructions to make their recipes fully immersive cooking guides.

Meredith (owner of Allrecipes) President Stan Pavlovsky highlights how the addition of voice and video transitions a simple recipe into an interactive experience: “Voice-led experiences are playing a rapidly growing role in helping home cooks discover and prepare recipes with ease. Adding visual guidance to that experience is the next step. With this skill, Allrecipes turns the cooking show of the past into an interactive and fully customizable experience that has more than 60,000 paths to choose.”

As recipes become more interactive and increasingly connected to cooking hardware through software, a new battleground is opening up to become the guided cooking software platform for the kitchen. While the new Alexa video skill no doubt creates new partnership opportunities for Allrecipes to work with cookware and appliance manufacturers, it also puts them more directly in competition with other players creating cooking guidance systems centered around recipe information.

Just this past month, cooking app maker SideChef launched its first app from a new publishing platform designed to create personality-centric guided cooking apps. The Budget Bytes app, created in cooperation with well-known food blogger Beth Moncel (the author behind the popular Budget Byes blog), combines photos, Alexa voice guidance with step-by-step instructions for the user.

This move follows efforts by companies like Drop and Innit to create guided cooking software platforms that connect directly with third party appliances and cookware through IoT technology.  Others, like ChefSteps and Hestan Cue, have created fully integrated systems that fuse recipe driven visual instruction apps with sensor-enabled cooking devices.

At the center of much of this activity is Amazon, acting as an IoT and AI “arms dealer” with Alexa and its hardware platforms to help power companies in the kitchen space to create new products and accelerate transitions to new business models. The new SideChef app integrates with Alexa, as does ChefSteps for its Joule connected cooking appliance. And while we have yet to see any significant move by these companies to utilize Amazon’s image recognition APIs, it’s just a matter of time before one of these companies incorporates the company’s computer vision technology as part of a guided cooking system.

Of course, Amazon partners always have to wonder which parts of the business the Seattle giant will ultimately decide to enter themselves. As we saw with Nucleus, Amazon often will partner with companies and then create specific products that look similar to those products. And, as Geekwire points out, with Whole Foods Amazon now has access to a large cache of recipe information. Chances are they will eventually look to that data more closely with the Alexa and Dash platforms to power their own devices and create opportunities for direct commerce.

But for now, Allrecipes and others are happy to work with Amazon to help transition the recipe from a simple list of ingredients to interactive guidance platform.

Ok Google, What’s For Dinner?

When Google Home first arrived on the scene, Mike and Ashley speculated on the Smart Kitchen Show about how it would stack up against Amazon Echo. Amazon’s big entrance into the smart home, Echo came with convenient functions like timers, grocery lists, playing on-demand streaming music and radio services and eventually included recipe skills. It was an ideal device to sit on your kitchen counter.

Google introduced its answer to Echo but at first lacked the functionality that Echo has grown to enjoy due to its open API and thousands of skills developed by third parties. One of those skill areas that’s seen growth is in food & beverage, especially recipes. But this week, Google partnered with big food content houses like the Food Network, New York Times and Bon Appetit to give Home users access to over 5,000 recipes that can be read step by step by the Google Assistant.

The interesting thing about Google Home’s announcement is the way Google is adding functionality to its device. Amazon’s Alexa relies on skills developed by other companies – in order to get access to Allrecipes content, for example, you have to enable that skill in your app before you can use it.

Google takes a different approach; if you have a specific recipe you want to look up, you can head to the Google Assistant app on your phone, pick it out and send it to Google Home to walk through. So a component of this feature still involves your phone – unless you want suggested recipes, and then you can just ask “Ok Google, let’s make spaghetti” and Google’s Assistant will suggest a recipe for you. That suggestion feature, enabled without any input on the part of the user, is fairly unique.

The process is a little more intuitive and baked into the platform than Alexa skills, which sometimes can be clunky depending on how the developer choose to integrate. Some skills require you to say “Alexa, ask (brand/company) to XYZ” which is an awkward way to speak and harder to remember.

Google also choose powerhouse brands to partner with for this integration – collectively, Food Network, NYT and Bon Appetit have amassed loads of food content through the years and probably have recipes for just about anything you’d want to cook. In fact, these and other publication and content houses are constantly thinking about how to leverage their digital warehouses of recipes and food knowledge and partnerships like these are easy ways to make money outside of traditional advertising.

According to Google, the feature will start rolling out in the coming days. We’ll finally be able to say – Ok Google, let’s eat.

Allrecipes Skill Brings Alexa Closer To Being The ‘Kitchen Computer’

Maybe Amazon is working on a kitchen computer after all.

But instead of rolling out the purpose built kitchen computing device rumored a year ago, the kitchen ‘computer’ from Amazon is taking shape in the form of Alexa, the company’s voice control interface and virtual assistant, as well as the dozens of cooking and kitchen focused Alexa skills.

We’ve covered the growing list of kitchen-centric skills here at The Spoon, which include offerings from the likes of the Food Network and Campbells Soup, but with the company’s latest skill, Alexa users now have access to a massive database of recipe content and recommendations from one of the biggest recipe sites in the world.

That’s because this latest addition to Amazon’s ‘kitchen computer’ comes from Allrecipes, the granddaddy of cooking sites with over 60 thousand digital recipes. In addition to access to the site’s huge recipe repository, users will also be able to get voice guided cooking instructions, which will allow them to “control the pace of their cooking by instructing Alexa to pause, next, repeat, skip or move forward.” This evolution goes beyond what was previously available through Alexa’s native Cookbook skill offering, not only in the breadth of recipes but also in the voice guidance feature.

For Allrecipes part, it marks a continued evolution of one of the longest standing recipe and cooking-centric sites on the Internet. The company has been increasingly positioning itself as a cooking-centric social network in recent years, and this past October launched a new cable TV show on CW centered around the Allrecipes brand.

At the Smart Kitchen Summit last month, AllRecipes VP Esmee Williams talked about how much things have changed since the company’s early days in the nineties.

“The top search term (in 1999) was ‘recipes,’” said Williams. “Today the search terms are so much more granular. It’s like pork chops, gluten free, paleo, ready in 15 minutes, no garlic. The cooks have become so much more sophisticated.”

And with their new Allrecipes skill, users can now ask Alexa to help them find that gluten free pork chop recipe.

Podcast: The New Food Network – Food Media & Discovery in Age of Buzzfeed

This episode features a conversation from the stage of Benaroya Hall in Seattle at SKS16. Included in the conversation are:

Ashlee Clark-Thompson, CNET; Tiffany Lo, Buzzfeed/Tasty; Kevin Yu, SideChef; Esmée Williams, AllRecipes

The panel description from this session is as follows: The number one video publisher in the world today is Buzzfeed’s Tasty, which had almost 2 billion views in the month of May for its short how-to cooking videos made for the Millennial generation. In the age of apps and online video, cooking discovery and education is changing rapidly and this panel will explore what the Cooking Channel of tomorrow will look like.

Raised In Era Of Frozen Meals, Millennials Go Online To Learn How To Cook (VIDEO)

Back when Esmée Williams started working at Allrecipes in the late nineties, search inquiries on the massively popular recipe discovery site were, to say the least, a little basic.

“The top search term (in 1999) was ‘recipes’,” said Williams at the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle.

Nowadays things are a little different.

“Today the search terms are so much more granular,” said Williams, now VP of consumer and brand strategy at the site which brought in 46 million seekers last November. “It’s like pork chops, gluten free, paleo, ready in 15 minutes, no garlic. The cooks have become so much more sophisticated.”

Williams joined other panelists to discuss how social media and digital platforms are changing the way consumers discover recipes and teach themselves to cook. Alongside Williams was Tiffany Lo, producer for Buzzfeed’s Tasty, Kevin Yu, CEO of SideChef, and the session was moderated by CNET journalist Ashlee Clark-Thompson.

One big focus of the 30-minute conversation (which you can watch below) was how Millennials are changing food and cooking discovery.

Kevin Yu pointed out that food and social media are tightly intertwined for Millennials.

“There’s two most shared photos on the Internet,” said Yu. “The first is the selfie. The second is food. It really starts with food discovery, food passion. Millennials are incredibly passionate about food.”

Williams pointed to the upbringing of many Millennials to explain their hunger for cooking information online.

One hurdle for Millennials wanting to cook is “not having that right skill set,” said Williams.

“A lot of folks have grown up in homes where both parents worked, in the eighties and nineties there were a lot of frozen meals that hit the mainstream. Maybe they didn’t get the skills they might need. Certainly, video plays a huge role in helping them obtaining those skills.”

This hunger to learn no doubt helped fuel the rise of Buzzfeed’s Tasty, which has used its quick-play first-person perspective recipe videos to fuel its growth on the way to becoming biggest video publisher worldwide in early 2016. According to Lo, the idea started as something fairly simple.

“When we started out, we were focusing on YouTube before Tasty,” said Lo. “Then our editorial team started uploading single recipe videoes with their iPhone. A little over a year later, decided to make a team and page dedicated to food videos.” The results surprised even her.

“No one on the team expected it to grow as fast as it did,” she said.

When Clark-Thompson asked about the importance of community, Allrecipes’ Williams said she is continually amazed at how communal the act of cooking can be.

“It has amazed me at how willing people are to share their food experiences. On some recipes, we have ten thousand reviews. It always surprises me, what does that ten-thousandth person feel like they had to say that was so different than all the people before? They just want to say ‘hey, I made this too!'”

Yu said the combination of new hardware and software in the kitchen will create entirely new experiences in coming years, not unlike how it’s recreating the automobile industry today.

“When you have Tesla and you have made an incremental technological jump like adding an electric engine, that’s great for cars, but when you add the software piece, you have a driverless car,” said Yu.

“What is this new driverless car of the smart kitchen space?” he asked.

While the panelists didn’t have the answer for what the driverless car of the smart kitchen would be, Buzzfeed’s Lo did offer some guidance for product makers: follow the Tasty video model.

“Make it approachable and simple,” she said.

Watch video below: