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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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BuzzFeed’s Tasty Expands E-Commerce Capabilities with Walmart Agreement

BuzzFeed’s cooking site, Tasty, along with Walmart and Jet.com announced a partnership today that allows consumers to purchase equipment necessary for making certain recipes directly from the Tasty app. The move continues the trend of vertical integration we’ve seen elsewhere in the food world, and sets up BuzzFeed to expand its e-commerce ambitions.

Starting today, Tasty recipes will include direct links to Walmart/Jet.com to buy the tools needed for that dish. Right now, users can only buy hardware items such as a slow cooker, or skillet or measuring cups. The company says it plans to include the purchase of groceries “beginning next year.”

For Walmart, the partnership gives the retailer access to the enormously popular Tasty base, which has generated more than 65 billion video views and has more than 90 million followers on Facebook. Tasty has already shown that it can move units. As The Spoon’s Mike Wolf wrote last month:

“Last year, the company worked with Oster to run a sponsored cooking video that included the Oster grill. Within a day, the Oster grill had completely sold out on Amazon, despite the fact the cooking video didn’t have a link to the Oster grill Amazon page.”

Recipes are becoming more than a set of instructions, they are becoming more direct commerce vehicles. AllRecipes launched shoppable recipe lists through AmazonFresh earlier this year. And as same day delivery companies like Instacart expand, recipes are no longer constrained by what people have in the kitchen. With instant gratification increasingly available, inspiring recipes can inspire people to pay for the tools and ingredients immediately.

But this also sets the stage for BuzzFeed to expand it’s own hardware ambitions. As the company missed revenue targets, it is expanding its Product Labs, which created the Tasty One Top induction cooking device. From a memo BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti sent out to employees:

“Finally, we are expanding our Product Labs business, which exceeded our expectations in its first full year of operations, into BuzzFeed Commerce which has a strong lineup of new licensing and commerce partnerships, and new products for 2018. BuzzFeed Commerce will work closely with our new BuzzFeed Media Brands team to create new opportunities for our brands in the way it has with Tasty.”

Partnering with Walmart lets BuzzFeed use Tasty as a way to convert the eyeballs of its massive audience into consumers who buy the $149 One Top, or whatever BuzzFeed-branded cooking implement the company wants to create.

BuzzFeed has proven adept at navigating rapidly changing technology trends and fickle attention spans. This deal with Walmart is another great example of the company’s nimbleness by expanding the utility of Tasty in a way that is organic to the experience and potentially adding to the bottom line.

FirstBuild Wants to Crowdsource A Next-Gen Drink Machine For Your Sink

FirstBuild, the idea incubator and microfactory from GE Appliances, and the company behind the popular Opal Nugget Ice Maker, is hoping to crowdsource a drink machine that could go directly in your sink. The company is teaming up with cloud-based CAD software company OnShape in what they are calling the Drink Sink Challenge, a contest where makers will submit their CAD-based concepts to a panel of judges and the top three winners will be awarded cash prizes.

The contest follows a recent hackathon by FirstBuild in which the winner was a group that proposed the idea of integrating a drink dispenser directly into a sink. From the contest starter kit:

Last month, GE Appliances’ FirstBuild hosted a hackathon where the winning team developed an idea for a drink dispenser combined with a kitchen sink. With the growth of pod-based beverage centers for both coffee and cold beverages, this totally makes sense: Users are looking for more streamlined experiences, especially when precious kitchen countertop space is at stake.

The thing is, this does totally make sense. The great unspoken problem in the digital kitchen revolution is a lack of counter space for all these cool new products, so I really like the idea of building more stuff into the actual counters. And besides, who wouldn’t want a next-gen drink machine built into the sink the dispenses hot, cold and fizzy drinks?

According to the contest rules, any design must dispense one or more of the following:

• Ice
• Hot water served at 170° F or higher
• Single-serving coffee using a Keurig or
similar beverage pod
• Chilled water served at 40° F or lower
• Chilled carbonated water
• Chilled flavored beverages

Making things even more interesting is the contest is cosponsored by Lowe’s and Delta Faucet.  While early FirstBuild products like the Opal Ice Maker and the Paragon have been innovative, they’ve yet to really become mass market products. I’m intrigued to see if whether working with a large retailer and faucet company in these types of competitions could ultimately lead to productization of some cool ideas that reach wider audiences.

Another interesting angle to the competition is it looks like it’s one of the first big competitions for the new Giddy platform from GE Appliances and the folks that created FirstBuild. The platform is primarily an app that enables designers and creators to enter contests that range from ones with cash prizes (like the Drink Sink) to smaller ones like the Napkin Sketch Challenge for reimagining the future of the spice rack. This paper napkin sketch concept is really cool since folks are actually turning in what looks like sketches on napkins. One of my favorites is this Spice Jar Table RFID Reader.

An RFID Spice rack. Source: Giddy creator AaronMcD.

Giddy is somewhat reminiscent of Quirky, the crowdsourced creation company that was closely tied to FirstBuild in its early days.  Quirky, which just debuted a new version of itself under its new owners, had raised $30 million from GE in 2013 to design and build connected home products. Quirky was founded by Ben Kaufman. In a sign that old collaborations never die but are just reinvented, Kaufman’s Buzzfeed Labs teamed up with FirstBuild this summer to help build the Tasty One Top.