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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

AmazonFresh

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.

Martha Stewart + Amazon Partner To Bring You Dinner Tonight

The best part about meal kits is that they take away the need to meal plan and decide what’s for dinner. Each week, a box arrives at your door and gives you 3-5 preplanned dinners with exactly the right ingredients to prepare and cook each. The worst part? The amount of planning it requires to get the kits in the first place.

The problem meal kits solve is the age old question – what’s for dinner in the future – but they don’t tackle the very common, end of the week and out of groceries question – what’s for dinner TONIGHT? If you’re like me, you have at least one night in the week where you’ve made all your meals, you haven’t grocery shopped yet, and take out just doesn’t sound appealing (or healthy). Martha Stewart (and Amazon) are here to help.

Martha Stewart partnered last year with Marley Spoon to create a branded meal kit, joining the 100+ other meal kits out there, many of them also backed by a celebrity name. But they recently announced a true stand-out feature – partnering with AmazonFresh, Stewart & Marley Spoon will now ship their meal kit the same day you order it.

According to Inc, who has the full scoop,

Users can now order a single meal for two adults in the morning, and find it on their doorsteps that evening.

The company hopes that the move will give them an edge in the meal kit market, and welcome new consumers into the fold. The typical meal kit consumer tends to be 25-44 – Marley Spoon hopes this move might appeal to older consumers as well who aren’t able to leave the home as much. It seems more likely that it will open them up to people who aren’t great at planning meals all the time – busy parents, or busy professionals in general – and want a quick, last minute solution that isn’t takeout.

The meals can be ordered in the morning and will run about $24/meal for the food and on demand service. Not cheap, but probably similar to what a restaurant-quality takeout meal would cost and with fresher, healthier ingredients.

Amazon, on the other hand, is clearly interested in all areas of food commerce – from the grocery store to fresh food delivery to meal kits, they’re putting their footprints in almost every area.

Amazon Using Delivery Arm To Accelerate Mom + Pop Food Shops

Amazon has long been known for its desire to own all parts of online commerce and with the growth of AmazonFresh, its grocery delivery, it has extended its reach into millions of kitchens. But the online giant has also been intentional about its support for the little guy – from startups to small companies, Amazon is often seen providing a platform for anyone to expand their reach. Like their startup platform LaunchPad, which serves up physical products from startups to millions of Amazon consumers, AmazonFresh is now offering artisanal and “local” fair to customers on the Eastern seaboard.

The shop local and farmer’s market movement has faced growing competition from online commerce, particularly the move to automate grocery ordering & delivery. But it’s not a perfect replacement because it often doesn’t allow for customers to find local produce or handmade items similar to the ones they’d find at their local farmer’s market.

And then there’s the farmer/artisan perspective. Many of these small businesses do less than $50k in revenue every year and are unable to grow beyond their geographical region do to economies of scale. That’s where AmazonFresh comes in. The company’s delivery arm offers a vehicle and a platform to serve up items like specialty cupcakes, unique and local meats and nitro coffee.

The companies who have already signed on to participate in the AmazonFresh delivery program have already seen an increase in sales and are reaching new customers they otherwise would have no way to engage with. In a comment to the Washington Post, Amazon spokesperson commented on the program’s early success, “Many of these companies began with Amazon in mid-September and only six weeks into the program have seen sales that will be significant and impactful to their businesses.”

From a convenience perspective, it’s easy to see why it would be appealing for a consumer, who might not always get to the weekly farmer’s market, to be able to have access to local and fresh goods while also supporting small mom and pop operations. And for Amazon, the company knows that few people do their entire household shopping at a farmer’s market or small marketplace, so they’re offering the best of both worlds – large superstore goods and artisanal and specialty items – and benefitting from customers seeking the convenience of all-in-one shopping.

Read more about the AmazonFresh farmer’s market approach at The Washington Post.