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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Fexy

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.

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.

Amazon Teams With Fexy To Create Shoppable Recipes

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.