Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

relish

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 Even Walmart and Target’s websites can be out of date by the time you actually get to the store.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.