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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Fexy Media Launches Relish+ as Premium Paid Feature on Relish.com

Relish.com, a web app created by Fexy Media for meal planning, recipes, and grocery shopping, announced today that it has launched a premium feature called Relish+. The new service will now allow users to have access to a library of over 100 meal plans for a monthly fee starting at $3.75.

The new meal plans on Relish+ are developed by nutritionists, and the recipes are sourced from popular recipe developers and food bloggers. Called “Fodcasts”, users can subscribe to the meal plans that match their interests, just like they would to a podcast.

Once subscribed to the meal plans, users can then add them to a calendar to plan all meals for the entire week or even the next month. The meal plans are customizable and can be edited to change the serving size, alter or delete certain recipes, and add or delete certain days. With the premium subscription, users can also create their own meal plans by dropping their desired recipes into a blank meal plan template.

Ingredients found within the meal plans can be consolidated to create a grocery list. This is list can simply be used by the user to go shopping or sent to a grocery delivery service that is integrated into the app (both of these features are currently available with the free version of Relish.com).

Meal planning and grocery shopping can be tiresome, especially after 15+ months of predominately eating at home, so services like Relish.com and Relish+ are very relevant at the moment. Another app, Whisk, allows users to discover and save recipes, and then shop for the ingredients through the app. Samsung announced at the beginning of this year that it added shoppable recipes and guided cooking through its SmartThings Cooking mobile app.

The Relish+ meal planning library will continue to expand after today’s launch with new meal plans added each week. The subcription starts at $3.75 per month if paid for the entire year up front, and 3-month and 6-month memberships exists starting at $4.95 per month.

Fexy Media’s Cliff Sharples Talks Serious Eats Sale and Getting Out of the Editorial Business

There are two sides to every story. For example, earlier today, digital publisher Dotdash announced that it had expanded further into food editorial content with the acquisition of Simply Recipes and Serious Eats from Fexy Media. The flip side of that news is that Fexy Media is getting out of the editorial business to focus on its core technology platform.

“We are divesting ourselves from [the] digital media ad supported model,” Fexy Media Co-Founder and Co-CEO Cliff Sharples told me by phone this morning. “We are really focused on being a technology company and ultimately building a marketplace.”

Fexy Media’s main business is its Relish shoppable recipe platform that Sharples says now reaches more than 120 million users a month across its 30 blog partner sites. Simply Recipes and Serious Eats will both remain Fexy content partners and use the Relish platform, so Fexy isn’t losing any audience or reach.

Fexy’s move away from editorial is understandable. One, as noted, creating editorial content is not the company’s core focus. Second, creating good editorial content on an ongoing basis is hard, and harder to justify when it isn’t your core business. There is also already a ton of competition from big and smaller food media players alike. Finally, we are in the midst of pandemic-related behavioral changes that could translate into bigger upside for Fexy. COVID-19 has forced the closure of dine-in options at restaurants, not to mention forced the closure of restaurants altogether. This means that people are eating at home more, which in turn spurs people to seek out and discover new foods to cook (hello, sourdough!). That’s where Fexy comes in.

Fexy’s Relish generates revenue through its shoppable recipe relationships. Find a recipe you like at a participating Relish site, click a button and all the items are sent to a grocery retailer where you can make your purchase and, increasingly, have those items delivered on the same day. Fexy monetizes the idea of consumers turning discovery into action through product placements, revenue shares and affiliate programs.

Buying groceries online is something else that has gotten a push from the pandemic. Fears over COVID translated into record amounts of online grocery shopping over the past six months and grocery e-commerce in the U.S.

“Over the full scope of the pandemic, we’ve seen more than a tripling of take rate in terms of people using relish, building out recipes and sending those to [retail] partnerships,” Sharples said.

And while online grocery shopping has fallen from its record highs in recent months, it’s projected to hit $250 billion in total sales in the U.S. by 2025. So there is a huge opportunity for Fexy to focus on expanding its with retailers and other content sites, rather than trying to build out their own.

Dotdash Acquires Simply Recipes and Serious Eats from Fexy Media

Digital publisher Dotdash announced today that it has acquired the websites Simply Recipes and Serious Eats from Fexy Media. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Dotdash was already a sizeable player in the consumer content publishing space, owning such brands as The Spruce, Lifewire, TreeHugger and Liquor.com. This is the fifth acquisition for Dotdash since 2019. According to the press announcement, Simply Recipes and Serious Eats will keep using Fexy’s Relish shoppable recipe and menu-planning technology, and Relish will be added across The Spruce Eats.

Combined, Simply Recipes and Serious Eats reach more than 16 million people per month (comScore August 2020) the two companies reported in its press release. Dotdash is acquiring the 27 employees of Simply Recipe and Serious Eats, and plans to invest in both properties. Dotdash CEO Neil Vogel told Axios:

“To make a food site work now, you have to make GIFs. You have to have incredible video capabilities,” says Vogel. “You have to explore the cultural history of recipes and talk about nutrition. All these things you never had to do 5 years ago, but now you have to do them.”

Dotdash will continue to monetize the sites through advertising, though Vogel told Axios that the number and types of ads on both sites will be more optimized.

Fexy’s network of partner recipe sites also includes brands such as FoodieCrush, Recipe Girl and Macheesmo, which offers shoppable recipes via the Relish platform. Additionally, earlier this year at the height of pandemic panic-shopping, the company released an online tool that let you see if certain goods are in-stock at your local Target and Walmart. We reached out to Fexy Media to find out more about this deal from its end and will update this post as we hear back.

The pandemic has also provided an opportune time for Dotdash to bolster its recipe-related content. With COVID shutting down dine-in options at restaurants (and closing restaurants altogether), more people have been pushed into preparing more of their meals at home. Simply Recipes and Serious Eats are both big brand names in the world of food that should help Dotdash expand its reach.

UPDATE: an earlier version of this story listed recipe partner sites as being owned by Fexy.

The Relish Stock Tracker Helps You Locate Hard to Find Grocery Items

The Spoon’s North Star during this time of pandemic has been ‘how can we be of use?’ Well, you’d be hard-pressed to find something more useful for a nation desperately searching for toilet paper and bread flour than the Relish Stock Checker.

Launched today by Relish, an online meal planning and grocery shopping tool owned by Fexy Media, the Relish Stock Checker is a free tool to help you locate 50 of the hardest-to-find grocery staples (think: paper towels, pasta, sugar, canned beans, etc.) at nearby Targets and Walmarts. Just enter your zip code and the Relish Stock Checker will help you see which store locations in your area have these items in stock.

While stores are returning to normal after a bout of pandemic-induced panic shopping, there are still empty shelves for many of the staples people need to stock up on. In a time when actually going to a grocery store can potentially expose you to others with COVID-19, knowing ahead of time if a store has the item you need can help reduce risk by cutting wasted trips.

We don’t know how up-to-date the Relish Stock Checker is (Relish is tied into Walmart and Target’s APIs because of its shoppable recipes). Even Walmart and Target’s websites can be out of date by the time you actually get to the store. But at least Relish is providing some indication of available stock, and lets you aggregate results from both Walmart and Target without having to go to their sites individually.

The other bummer, if we can even call it that in these crazy times, is that Relish Stock Checker only works with Target and Walmart. In the press announcement, the company says that it will be adding more locations and grocery items in the coming weeks. There will even be a module where shoppers can submit suggestions for items they want to find.

Once the company does that, the Relish Stock Checker will be even more useful.

Fexy Media Launches Relish to Make (All) Recipes Scalable, Saveable and Shoppable

Today Fexy Media announced the launch of Relish Network, a web app that allows recipe publishers to add features like menu planning to their sites, as well as make their recipes saveable, scalable, and shoppable. The app premiered on Fexy-owned websites Simply Recipes and Serious Eats, and will roll out on other publishing platforms later this year.

Eventually, users will be able to aggregate recipes from all sites in the Relish Network to create custom menus and meal plans. With one click they can then turn those meal plans into grocery lists, which online grocery retailers will deliver or prepare for pickup (as long as the user lives in an area with those services). Right now, the list of participating names includes Amazon Fresh, Instacart and Kroger ClickList.

We spoke with Fexy co-CEO and co-founder Cliff Sharples earlier today, who said that Relish is “effectively a new iteration of shoppable recipes.” Relish also lets users change the number of servings for their recipe, keep favorite recipes in their “Relish box,” and substitute ingredients.

When I first poked around Simply Recipes to try out the Relish tool, I found . . . nothing. Sharples explained to me over the phone that the shoppable buttons are geotargeted. In other words, they won’t show up if you’re not in an area with Fexy-partnered grocery delivery services. Since I had an ad blocker on, apparently it didn’t sense me. However, once I turned my ad blocker off for Simply Recipes, I could see the button. This is definitely a UX issue that Fexy will have to address in the future, unless I’m an anomaly. (Let me know in the comments!)

My summery shopping list on Simply Recipes.

Interestingly, all recipe sites are welcome to join Relish — not just ones owned by Fexy.  And according to their press release, Relish technology can be implemented at “little to no cost” to food publishers.

“The ultimate goal with the Relish Network is to offer a set of very high quality recipe sites… even ones that are competitors, ultimately,” said Sharples. “Users have to have relatively unrestrained choice.”

This idea echoes back to Michael Wolf’s piece last week on DRM and locking in the consumer. Fexy is choosing not to force or limit consumer’s recipe behavior, which is a smart move; with the diversity and amount of recipe publications out there, no one is loyal to only one site.

“Relish will help us enable the next big sea change in how people think about groceries,” said Sharples. “It’s able to ultimately help with that daily question of ‘What’s for dinner tonight?'” It definitely has competition: companies like Innit, Whisk, and Mucho are already deep in the shoppable recipe space. We’ll see if Relish is different enough to make a splash in the highly competitive future of recipes.

 

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.