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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

recipes

Introducing Manna Cooking, the Recipe App That’s All About Community

The idea for Manna Cooking came, in a way, from CTO and co-founder Guy Greenstein’s mom — a private chef who cooks all-vegan, all-kosher food. It dawned on Greenstein one day that his mom’s workstation was totally unmanageable, a chaos of notebooks and binders overflowing with heavily annotated recipe clips. He searched for an app that would help her to streamline things but came up empty-handed.

So Greenstein teamed up with his childhood friends and co-founders Josh and Rachel Abady to create a platform that would allow users like his mom to organize, customize, and share recipes. The app, Manna Cooking, is making its official debut today on the Apple App Store. I got on Zoom last week with Josh and Rachel (the company’s CEO and CMO, respectively) to learn more about the launch.

The name of the app was inspired by the three co-founders’ early years at a Jewish day school. “Manna is what supposedly fell from the sky to nourish the Israelites — to give them everything they needed,” said Rachel, who came up with the name. “Our app is supposed to be your buddy in the kitchen that gives you everything you need to cook.”

Rachel and Josh led me on a tour of the app over Zoom. The digital environment is bright and easy to navigate, made friendlier by Chef Mic, the app’s cartoon personality. The app draws on popular social media features to help users discover new recipes: You can flick through recipes dating app-style in swipe mode, or scroll through other users’ posts in the discover feed. Users can also create and import recipes themselves.

Manna follows through on its promise of creating a single, centralized space for users to manage their recipes. In the cookbook environment, the app allows you to edit any recipe you’ve liked and save a new version. (The app also automatically flags recipe ingredients that might be incompatible with your diet.) When you want to start cooking a dish, the app guides you through the recipe one step at a time in much the same way Google’s Maps app takes you step-by-step toward your destination, saving the need to scroll back and forth between an ingredients list and instructions.

There are currently about 10,000 recipes on the app. Some are from a collection of pre-approved websites from which users can instantly import recipes; some were created by the app’s beta testers; and some were curated by Manna’s in-house recipe creator.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced Greenstein and the Abady siblings to take an unconventional approach to fundraising. They had secured some funding pre-COVID (including from David Greenstein, Guy’s father and a co-founder of the brand incubator Wonder Brands) but the pandemic scorched opportunities to proposition restaurateurs and other funders. “But we realized, even more than it’s about food, our app is about community. So if we’re a community, why not use the community to be the source of our funding as well?” Josh said.

The team used Wefunder to raise about $150,000, which helped them to create a beta version of the Manna Cooking app. That crowdfunding approach also helped the team to create a pool of dedicated beta testers: “Our first wave of testers really had skin in the game, because they had given us funds anywhere from $100 upwards,” Rachel said. “So we already had built-in super testers.”

Manna has partnered with restaurateur and chef David Burke, giving users access to simplified recipes for restaurant dishes. They’ve also identified brand-aligned social media influencers, who are creating recipes, providing feedback, and helping to promote the app.

This spring, Manna will work on raising a more conventional seed funding round. In the next couple of months, the team plans to lock in a partnership with a grocery retailer, which will allow them to launch an automatic ordering feature.

But the team’s number one priority is user acquisition, and their success there may hinge on how well the platform fosters in-app community building. At the end of the day, the promise of the app is to provide a simplified, social cooking experience, especially for users with specific dietary needs — people who want to cook gluten-free food, or vegan food, and get inspired by others who cook and eat like them.

As Josh put it: “There’s millions of people who fit each of these descriptions, and each of them should feel like they have a community that they can engage with in one, centralized place.”

Pepper the App Aims to be the Instagram for Cooking

Jake Aronskind realized that every time he went on a social media platform, most of what he was seeing was food. After the pandemic began, this was amplified. Seeing people he never thought would be cooking and baking made him realize that there needed to be a more specialized platform for sharing food and recipes. This resulted in him and several cofounders developing the Pepper app.

Specialized social media platforms exist for activities like running (Strava), reading (Goodreads), and hiking (AllTrails). Still, most foodies share their culinary creations on the most popular platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, TikTok, and Pinterest. I recently spoke with Aronskind prior to Pepper’s Labor Day weekend launch, and he said, “It’s this idea of building a platform for a specific niche in your life. At the end of the day, Instagram, Facebook, all these other platforms, are simply not made for niche activities.”

Pepper most closely follows the format of Instagram. The app features a newsfeed where you can see the posts from friends and the people you follow. Instead of just adding a caption to go along with a photo, the poster can add a full recipe or list of ingredients. Similar to hashtags, there are options to categorize the recipe with different tags, including different diets (i.e., vegan, keto, gluten-free), difficulty level, and meal type.

From the app’s explore page, trending recipes can be seen from other users. If you find a recipe you want to make on the explore page or newsfeed, you can click the “save” button on the photo. The “saved” section on your personal profile hosts these posts, acting almost like a digital cookbook.

Pepper the App Animation Video
Pepper’s how-to video

Social media is how many of us stayed connected with others during the pandemic, and in 2020, Americans spent an average of 82 minutes per day on social media platforms. Cooking and “stress-baking” became coping mechanisms for dealing with the negative psychological effects of the pandemic, so it’s no surprise that food posts have dominated social media platforms in the past year and a half.

Recon, a food social media app that launched at the beginning of summer (founded by former Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff), connects users through photos of homemade dishes and restaurant reviews. Whisk, a recipe-sharing app, partnered with TikTok at the beginning of the year to trial run the integration of its recipe saving and grocery list features. Foodqu!rk is an online platform where users find their food personality and connect with others through dietary preferences.

The Pepper app launched this week, and it is available for free in the iOS App Store. It will likely be available for Android phones by the end of the month.

Tweet at Kroger’s Chefbot to Find Recipes for Ingredients You Have on Hand

The last day before you go back to the grocery store can be a difficult one when you’re trying to make a meal. What you have left in your pantry is often a random assortment of odds and ends that may or may not go together.

To help consumers avoid giving up and getting restaurant delivery, or, much worse, letting those random items go to waste, Kroger launched its new Chefbot today. Found @KrogerChefbot on Twitter, Kroger says this AI-powered tool will help you discover recipes that put those odds-and-ends foods to tasty use.

To use Chefbot, take a picture of three ingredients and tweet @krogerchefbot. The bot replies with what it thinks is in your picture. If it’s correct, it gives you a link to a page with recipes for your ingredients.

With the pandemic still keeping restaurants closed and winter being on its way, chances are good a lot of us will be eating at home a lot more in the coming months. So another easy meal discovery tool could be pretty useful.

However, at least based on my first test this morning, I’m not sure Kroger’s Chefbot is that tool. To give it a spin, I took a pick of tofu, penne pasta and an avocado and tweeted that pic to Chefbot. Maybe it’s first-day jitters, but Chefbot could only identify one item — penne, and that could be because the box had a giant “penne” written on the side. Chefbot also guessed that I had salmon, which… I’m not sure where it got that one as you can see from the picture below.

I thought I had even cheated a little bit by including the barcode and the tofu label.

Since it didn’t recognize my items, I listed them for Chefbot in a follow up tweet. It then sent me to recipe page that said “Sorry, your search for “avocado penne tofu” did not return any results,” so it gave me a bunch of recipes for chicken dinner recipes.

Kroger’s Chefbot is a lot like Whisk’s Cook Magic, though that service uses texts instead of Twitter, and it doesn’t try to identify pictures (it also seems like it might work better).

We are all for tech tools that help people make better meals at home and reduce food waste. But it seems like Kroger’s Chefbot may need to go back to culinary school to make its AI a little smarter.

Whisk Launches B2B Content Management Tool to Structure and Organize Recipe Data

Samsung subsidiary Whisk today announced the launch of its new artificial intelligence-powered recipe content management platform for CPG companies and retailers.

In a nutshell, Whisk’s new tool allows companies to unify and organize recipe data that may be scattered across multiple platforms. For instance, a retailer could have recipes that exist in a website, as downloadable PDFs or even in spreadsheets. Whisk’s tool hoovers up all of that disparate data, gives it structure and unifies it so all the legacy recipes are unified into a new, single platform.

In addition to pulling in all of the pre-existing data, Whisk’s new platform also tags that data and automatically provides enhanced nutritional information, and continues to do so as new recipes are added. Since Whisk does that data work on the back-end, all a retailer or CPG company needs to do is build out the front-end for a web or mobile app and plug it into the Whisk platform.

Because all of the data is tagged and nutritional information added, end users can then easily search and filter results (e.g., if someone is diabetic or hates mushrooms) for a more customized experience.

In addition to recipe discovery, any company building a new recipe experience with this content tool can also add a commerce option using Whisk’s shoppable recipe technology.

Finally, the Whisk content tool also lets companies publish their recipes on the Samsung platform, which means those recipes are discoverable on the screens of Samsung appliances like the Family Hub smart fridge.

Whisk’s content platform arrives at a time when more people are buying food online (thank you, pandemic) and also during a period where food brands are launching their own D2C channels. If Whisk’s tool works as promised, its ability to re-surface, re-purpose and enhance legacy recipes into a new digital experience could help create a new level of customer engagement for retailers and brands alike.

Whisk’s recipe content management tool is available today, and uses a SaaS model, charging a monthly fee that depends on the usage.

Recipes for Relief Sells Professional Chef’s Recipes to Quarantined Home Cooks

Though quarantine is forcing most of us to become more dedicated home cooks, few are making fancy, restaurant-worthy dishes every night. But that might change soon.

Recipes for Relief is a website where famous chefs and mixologists post recipes for meals and drinks. Each recipe features a title, the name of the chef who created it, and a short description. You can choose to purchase the recipe for $2, $5, or $10. All of the funds go directly back to the chefs or mixologists. 

The initiative grew out of meez, a recipe management tool that allows professional chefs and mixologists to digitize their recipes, make edits, scale it up/down to feed various amounts of diners, and share them with team members. Meez is currently in beta testing mode and was preparing to launch back when quarantine forced restaurants to shut their dining rooms. Since then, meez has pivoted to share the recipes with folks that are outside the professional kitchen — home cooks.

Recipes for Relief kicked off in mid-April and currently includes around 80 recipes from 20 chefs. I connected with Francine Lee, who does business development for meez, via phone to learn more about why the company decided to start Recipes for Relief. “Other than takeout and delivery, plus government aid, there’s no way to generate revenue for restaurants right now,” Lee told me. “We thought, ‘What can we do?'”

As a quarantined person who loves to cook, of course I had to give Recipes for Relief a try. I added two recipes to my cart that looked both delicious and achievable: Miso Biscotti and Cauliflower Mac and Cheese. Within 24 hours I got an email with a link to my meez account, which had the two recipes plus a dozen bonus ones. From my initial perusing, the recipes all seemed relatively easy to make and featured ingredients that the average person could actually find at a store.

Lee told me the company has also worked with the chefs to edit the recipes to make them doable for non-professionals — using more basic techniques, ubiquitous appliances, etc. “There’s also a lot of cool tips and tricks that happen in a professional kitchen that could be insightful for a home cook,” she told me. Recipes for Relief is also gathering data on what types of recipes people are buying most to curate their new offerings.

I was hesitant about the portion sizes of the recipes. Chefs obviously work on a much larger scale than home cooks. But meez has solved this problem by offering capabilities to scale the recipes (1/2x, 2x, 4x, etc) to accommodate any number of people. You can also manually enter the amount of any ingredient you have (e.g., 1 cup of cider vinegar) and all the other ingredients will adjust accordingly. You can even ask chefs about ingredient swaps in the comments. 

According to Lee, the conversions are actually one of the key selling points for both meez and Recipes for Relief. That could be especially useful in our quarantine kitchens, when we’re forced to work with what we have more than ever before. 

Recipes for Relief’s interface still needs some polishing. There were several grammatical errors and some of the instructions lacked detail. I’d also like allergy and dietary restrictions listed (vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free) clearly on the recipes. If meez decides to add a permanent tool targeting home cooks, not restauranteurs, these changes could make it a lot more useful.

As someone who’s worked in a restaurant and knows how complicated recipes not developed for home chefs can be, I’d normally be skeptical of tackling a restaurant recipe at home. But now, with time on my hands and a hankering for a physical project, there’s no better time to try my hand at a complicated recipe — especially if those recipes are also helping to support restaurants.

Delish to Host Instagram Live Cooking Classes for Parents and Kids

If you’re a parent working from home with kids out of school, chances are you’re on the lookout for creative ways to distract them — hopefully while they learn some things.

Maybe one of those things will be how to cook. Recipe platform Delish is launching an Instagram Live series to teach parents and kids how to cook together.

According to an email from Delish, the series will be hosted by the platform’s editorial director Jo Saltz and her children. Episodes will air each weekday at 1:00pm ET and last 15 to 20 minutes (the first episode aired today). If you can’t tune in at that time, episodes will be saved in a Highlights section of Delish’s Instagram so you can watch when you’re ready.

Each #CookingTogether lesson will feature “kid friendly” recipes like pizza waffles and something called puppy chow (which I just had to Google and must say, I now want very badly).

Healthy? Not exactly. But kids can be picky, and if you’re already fighting a battle trying to keep them educated and entertained it’s not exactly the time to try and sell them on broccoli, too.

I don’t have kids myself, but I think Delish’s #CookingTogether series is a smart way for the recipe brand to make the best of the current situation — and differentiate themselves from other recipe site competitors. While people are quarantined at home they’re looking for both inspiration on what to cook and free ways to entertain themselves (and their children).

I bet before the coronavirus pandemic has died down, we’ll be seeing a lot of recipe services experimenting with new tactics to cater to the new normal.

I Tried Hungryroot, the Healthy, 10-Minute Meal Kit. And it Actually Delivered

Whenever I get a pitch in my inbox asking me to sample a new product, my first reaction is usually skepticism. Could this cricket bar really be that good? Is it actually feasible that this pill will help me avoid a hangover? Will this meal kit really make me eat healthier in less time than other meal kits, or just cooking for myself?

That last pitch came from Hungryroot, the grocery-slash-meal-kit hybrid delivery service aimed at millennials trying to eat better. And the answer, much to my surprise, was yes. Hungryroot actually did make good on its promise: to provide simple, healthy recipes that can be prepared in under ten minutes.

How it works

On its website Hungryroot refers to itself not as a meal kit or a grocery delivery service, but a sort of hybrid of the two. The ingredients included are a mixture of known brands, like Beyond Meat sausages or Banza chickpea pasta, as well as Hungryroot-made offerings, including a range of sauces and pre-cooked grains. To get started you go onto HungryRoot’s site and create an account. Then you input any dietary restrictions (vegan, gluten-free, nut-free, etc.). You then choose your subscription plan, which is anywhere from 3-6 two-serving meals per week, plus snacks. I selected the smallest option, 3-6 meals, and chose a vegetarian meal plan.

A few days later a box arrived with 11 ingredients meant to create three plant-based meals: a Pasta (Banza chickpea pasta, HungryRoot Cashew Cheddar, baby broccoli), a Market Plate (shaved brussels, pre-cooked grain mix, and Beyond Meat sausage), and a Warm Bowl (HungryRoot lemongrass tofu, snap peas, and Lotus Foods brown rice ramen). There was also a tub each of Chickpea Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough and Black Bean Brownie Batter, which were gluten-free, vegan, and surprisingly delicious. I know, I’m as shocked as you are.

Test
My HungryRoot recipes [Photo: Catherine Lamb]

The Good

One of Hungryroot’s main selling points is the speed and ease with which you can prepare the meals. And, at least from my experience, they really deliver. The recipes I tried consisted of only three ingredients each, all of which were pre-prepped (the brussels sprouts were shredded, tofu nuggets pre-cooked, etc.). All I had to do was some light vegetable chopping, boil some water, sauté, and mix. Even if you have very, very few kitchen skills — and the bare minimum of appliances (read: pressure cookers) — you’d be able to nail these recipes. You don’t even need a microwave.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, the meals were meant to be ready in 10 minutes and… they actually were! Some even took less time than that. In the past when I’ve tried meal kits, the dishes often end up taking much more time and effort than their glossy recipe cards promise, so it was nice to be eating something warm and filling and full of vegetables mere minutes after I pulled the ingredients out of the fridge. All of the meals also had enough leftover for me to take them into lunch the next day.

A HungryRoot Pasta meal, with cashew cheddar sauce. [Photo: Catherine Lamb]

The Bad

There’s always a catch, and for Hungryroot that catch is its cost. Smaller deliveries, which include groceries to make 3-4 two-serving meals plus snacks, cost $69 per week. Medium deliveries (4-5 two-serving meals plus snacks) cost $99 per week, and large deliveries (5-6 two-serving meals plus snacks) are $129 per week. Shipping is free for all orders and you can pause your subscription at any time.

[Update: A representative from Hungryroot emailed me to note that the company has just rolled out a new food profile survey that allows them to design custom pricing plans based on family size, personal health goals, etc. Most plans range from $60 to $100 per week. Orders over $70 will receive free shipping.]

Hungryroot updates its offerings every Thursday, so there are always fresh options to choose from on their site, and deliveries happen weekly.

Cost-wise, Hungryroot’s service shakes out to $8-$12 per meal, depending on which service you choose. The pricing is in line with other meal kits on the market right now, like Blue Apron and Purple Carrot. HungryRoot meals also have the added benefit of taking less time than other meal kit competitors and requiring less elbow grease and fewer dishes. However, $70 will buy me groceries for 2-3 weeks’ worth of meals, so it felt indulgent to spend it on a single week’s worth of ingredients, even if they do save me a few minutes in the kitchen.

Hungryroot’s Market Bowl prepped and ready to eat. [Photo: Catherine Lamb]

When talking about food delivery of any kind, it’s required that we wag our fingers at the amount of packaging they use. Hungryroot did indeed come in a large box lined in foil insulation with ice packs, but the box and foil were home recyclable, as were the drained ice packs. At least they claimed. Regardless, I didn’t have to suffer the guilt that comes with shoving a bunch of bulky packaging into my garbage can, knowing it would end up in a landfill somewhere.

Is Hungryroot Worth It?

So do I recommend Hungryroot? Surprising no one more than myself, I actually do. For consumers that want to prioritize healthy eating and don’t mind paying for it, but are tired of prepackaged $15 takeaway salads, Hungryroot makes a lot of sense. In that way it’s similar to Daily Harvest, the frozen, pre-prepped smoothie and microwaveable meal service. Hungryroot requires more work than Daily Harvest, but it also has a bigger and tastier payout.

In the end, I think that Hungryroot is one of the rare direct-to-consumer meal companies to actually deliver on its promise of healthy, easy, plant-based meals. The question is whether there are enough of those consumers out there to save Hungryroot from the struggles that are affecting other meal kit and prepared food delivery companies.

Whisk Launches Consumer Facing App That Makes Any Recipe Shoppable

Today Whisk, maker of a B2B food and cooking commerce platform that was acquired earlier this year by Samsung NEXT, announced it was launching its first consumer-facing app on both iOS and Android. The app allows consumers to take any recipe they discover online and make it into a shopping list that they can use to buy food online or take with them on a trip to the corner grocery store.

The new app includes integrations with voice assistants like Alexa and Bixby, allowing users to add ingredients or items to a shopping list with their voice. It also includes a browser extension so users can clip recipes they find on the web and turn them into shopping lists and push into online shopping carts.

Once a user converts the recipe into something shoppable, they can then choose from one of the 32 grocery commerce partners that Whisk has integrated into the app. Online grocery partners for Whisk include Walmart among others.

While there are plenty of shopping list apps out there, the ability to clip and import any recipe discovered on the web and convert it into a shopping list seems pretty useful. Add in the social/family sharing capability, and it’s like a Pinterest meets Pocket for food making.

Previously a user would use Whisk as part of the experience on a Samsung or BSH Appliances fridge or through the website of a publisher partner, but really didn’t connect directly to the brand itself. That all changes with this rollout, as Whisk becomes a consumer facing platform for the first time.

“In the past, a user would have to use Whisk through one of our publisher partners,” said Whisk founder Nick Holzherr in an interview with The Spoon. “Today, anyone can use Whisk anywhere – regardless of whether it’s a user’s own recipe or something they’ve imported from the web.”

Interestingly, while Whisk was acquired by Samsung back in March, the consumer technology giant stayed decidedly low-key when it comes to pushing its brand as part of this new consumer app push. Outside of the new app’s integration with Samsung’s Bixby, a user would be hard pressed to see any real connection to Samsung in the new Whisk offering.

Despite Samsung’s hands-off approach, I imagine Whisk will look to tap its parent company’s resources as it endeavors to get the new app into the hands of consumers. Having consumers download an app is a much bigger ask than having them use a well-know online recipe platform such as Allrecipes (one of Whisk’s publishing partners), so creating trust and enabling discovery will take work. And, once a consumer installs an app, the biggest challenge is making sure they use it.

If you’d like to try out the new Whisk app, you can find it in the following locations: iOS and Android app stores, on the web, Chrome extension, Bixby, Alexa, & Google voice assistants.

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.

Discovery Announces Food Network Kitchen, a New Content, Recipe, and Grocery Platform

Have you ever watched Alton Brown or Ina Garten on Food Network and thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if these chefs were in my kitchen, walking me through the cooking process themselves, preferably over a glass of Chardonnay?”

You’re in luck, minus the Chardonnay. At today’s Amazon event in Seattle, Discovery, Inc., which owns Food Network, announced the impending launch of the Food Network Kitchen. The multi-faceted platform will offer 25 weekly live interactive cooking videos featuring celebrity Food Network chefs, as well as over 800 cooking classes and 3,000 instructional videos. It’s a separate, additional service from Food Network itself, which requires a cable subscription to watch.

Food Network Kitchen will launch in late October 2019 in select (unnamed) U.S. cities. The service will cost $7 per month. Subscribers will be able to access the content through voice control with Amazon Alexa and Echo devices, Amazon Fire TV, and iOS and Android mobile devices, with more device integrations to come in 2020. The platform also offers grocery delivery through Amazon Fresh.

In a press release sent to the Spoon, David Zaslav, President and CEO of Discover, Inc. called the Food Network Kitchen “not just another entertainment service” but something closer to “the ‘Peloton of Food.'” Like the fitness company’s streaming service, Food Network Kitchen will give users access not only to pre-recorded videos but also live instructional classes.

A lot of folks, myself included, watch Food Network not for actual cooking instruction but purely for entertainment. So I’m not sure how many people will want to cook along to Guy Fieri making chicken wings at 6 p.m. in their kitchen. However, the live aspect certainly has potential, especially if the Food Network includes a way for users to ask questions and have them answered via the chef in real time.

I’m also skeptical about whether kitchen purists who love watching chefs cook meals from scratch would also embrace next-gen technologies in the kitchen, like using Alexa to access recipes or ordering groceries online. Then again, kitchens are getting more and more connected as things like voice integration and grocery delivery grow more commonplace. As these connected tools become more frictionless, it’s likely that more traditionalist home chefs will embrace them, too.

Really though, this new platform demonstrates that Food Network is trying to evolve from just a television network and recipe hub to a more interactive, connected platform that meets consumers not on their couch but in their kitchen. Food Network Kitchen is the food and cooking brand’s first big push to go beyond the static screen and interact with consumers in this dynamic way — and I doubt it’ll be their last.

FoodNetwork.com’s Michelle Buffardi on Why Recipes (and Cooking) Won’t Be Obsolete

I can credit Food Network with kickstarting my obsession with food. When I was young I used to stay up and watch Emeril throwing his spices into pots with a “Bam!” and follow the fast-paced cooking challenges on Iron Chef. And of course cook along with all the recipes on FoodNetwork.com.

Back then, Food Network was one of the few players in the online recipe game. Now there’s a lot more competition, including new digital recipe sources like guided cooking apps and smart speakers. That’s why we’re so excited to have Michelle Buffardi, who oversees editorial and programming strategy for culinary content at FoodNetwork.com, Food.com and CookingChannelTV.com, speaking about the future of food media at the 2019 Smart Kitchen Summit next month.

Check out our Q&A with Buffardi below and get your tickets to see her in Seattle. Save 25 percent with code THESPOON25!

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.

You oversee culinary content for FoodNetwork.com. What does a day in the life look like?
No two days ever look alike! A day could include brainstorms (those are the best meetings!) or greenlights for things like recipes for video or otherwise, holiday programming since we work several months in advance, new video series or chefs and hosts we want to work with for digital series. I also have many meetings with other teams, such as our product and tech teams, about site enhancements and other projects to make sure the content and tech come together for the best user experience.

When I’m not in meetings, I’m working on editorial calendars or plans for different platforms—my team works on content across our website and apps—researching trends and new talent. When I have time in my day, I stop by our test kitchen for a tasting, which is where our recipe developers present the recipes they’ve made that day for various digital needs and projects. We taste them and give feedback.

Consumers have a plethora of different platforms at their fingertips to discover recipes. How do you entice them to come to FoodNetwork.com?
Our fans come to us for two main reasons: our culinary credibility and our variety of chefs and hosts. We have recipes for anything anyone is looking for developed by the best chefs on the planet, such as chefs from linear shows or exclusive digital projects and chefs from our test kitchen who develop recipes, write how-tos and do product tests for us.

We work hard to make sure we have recipes and content for trends, special diets, every holiday and of course, weeknight dinner recipes specialized to popular appliances (like the InstantPot). No matter what people are looking for, we have it.

In addition to people coming to us from search, our amazing team is great at promoting all of our content on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter), often with original content developed for each platform, and our editors work to share the best content in our weekly and daily newsletters. In short, we ensure that we’re giving our fans access to the best content in all of the places they visit and connect with us.

Two years ago at SKS Tyler Florence made the bold claim that the recipe is dead. What do you think?
I don’t want to disagree with Tyler! However, I don’t think cooking is dead, so I don’t think the recipe is dead. There is a trend, especially as more people gain confidence in the kitchen, of cooking without a recipe. That is winging it with familiar ingredients and methods, or taking a known recipe, like that stir-fry you have memorized, and swapping in different proteins, vegetables, sauces or seasonings.

The bowl and composed-food trends also lend themselves to no-recipe cooking — just layering delicious homemade or store-bought elements like grains, raw or roasted vegetables, sauces and salsa, roasted chicken or a fried egg. Even so, there are new cooks every day who need a recipe to get them going. Plus, even for experienced cooks, whenever we want to make something new or unfamiliar, we need that blueprint.

In short, I say the recipe is not dead; long live the recipe!

How do you think that recipes will continue to adapt to meet shifting consumer demands in the age of digitization and convenience?
This is so interesting and exciting to me. Recipes used to be made for magazines and consumer packaging, so they had to fit a specific format and word count. That’s not the case anymore. The formula is the same — people will always need to have the ingredients, measurements and the cooking method listed — plus a photo is important, too.

However, [I predict that] formats will change: recipes will start to look different depending on the platform they’re intended for, or will be written differently so that they can be read by a voice-enabled device, for example. The ways people consume information and the devices they use are constantly changing which means we’ll keep evolving the ways in which we deliver that information. Including recipes.

Want to see Michelle Buffardi speak about the future of the recipe in the digital age live? Get your tickets to SKS in Seattle on October 7-8th. We’ll see you there!

Jumprope Raises $4.5M for Guided Cooking through GIFS

As a teen I was briefly obsessed with making a very complicated, cream puff-heavy pastry called a croquembouche. I tried to make it using text-heavy cookbooks and bad internet photos, but to no avail.

Maybe if guided cooking service Jumprope had been around I would have fared better. The startup creates how-to slideshow videos showing you how to do everything from makeup looks to crafting to cooking. It already has a mobile site and just launched its iOS app yesterday — at the same time it announced a $4.5 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners (h/t Techcrunch).

Jumprope is pretty similar to most guided cooking apps. You can search for and select a recipe, after which you can see a visual ingredient list and click through the various recipe steps, each of which has a gif for reference.

Guided cooking has been gaining momentum over the past few years. There’s Innit and SideChef, Allrecipes, Yummly, and Project Foodie, to name a few. Companies like Amazon and Google are also making smart displays to bring guided cooking (and their smart speakers/devices) into the kitchen.

In fact, Jumprope, which was founded in 2017, is kind of late to the game (though admittedly they’re offering how-to’s for a lot more than cooking). But what could set Jumprope apart is its UX, which reminded me a lot of cooking how-to videos on Instagram from companies like Buzzfeed Tasty or Bon Appetit. Each how-to bit is illustrated with a short gif on a loop. It’s also super low-touch: no fancy paired induction cooktop or pan required — just a smartphone.

Youtube tutorials get billions of views teaching people how to do, well, everything. Jumprope is streamlining that process and chopping it up into little bite-sized gifs, so you can easily fast forward or rewind, even with greasy fingers. It also gets all its content from users, meaning it’s likely cheap to produce and easy to get a ton — though the quality of said content won’t necessarily be great.

I could see Jumprope integrating with an e-commerce service like Instacart or Amazon Fresh to make their recipes shoppable. That would mean users could decide to make meatballs, order all the ingredients for delivery that day (cause millennials love convenience), then cook them, all from one app.

It’s too soon to tell if Jumprope will be able to compete in the how-to cooking space with giants like Instagram or more established startups like SideChef and Innit. But I’m betting it will be a hit with millennials and especially Gen Z who are friendly with other gif-ified networks like Snapchat.

Here’s hoping they add a how-to gif guide for croquembouche…