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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

shoppable recipes

GE Appliances Partners With Kroger for Shoppable Recipes on Wi-Fi Connected Ovens

This week, GE Appliances (GEA) announced it has released a new software update that enables customers with GEA’s Wi-Fi-connected stoves to add items to their Kroger shopping carts through featured shoppable recipes on their wall ovens and slide-in ranges.

According to the announcement, the new partnership, which was distributed via an over-the-air update to what GEA says is 150 thousand appliances (which is, interestingly, a smaller number given to us when the company announced its ‘turkey mode’ software update in 2021), will enable customers to find a select set of curated recipes (13 recipes at release) from Kroger and select CPG brands (including King Arthur Baking). Once a customer chooses a recipe, the recipes will suggest what GEA calls precision cooking modes, which track cooking progress, modify temperatures and adjust cook times.

In addition to the guided cooking features built into the recipes. they also allow for some clickable commerce. GE Appliance users can click to view the list of ingredients and instructions within the recipe and, with an additional click, add all the recipe’s ingredients to their Kroger cart. GEA says customers can connect their GE appliance app to their Kroger account via a QR code scan setup.

This announcement from GE Appliances comes after the company announced an integration with Google Cloud’s Vertex generative AI integration with their cooking app earlier this year, which the company calls Flavorly. According to GE Appliances spokesperson Shawn Stover, the Flavorly AI integration enables customers to input items in their refrigerator, and the app will generate three suggested recipes to build around the ingredients.

Is Roku About To Bring Us Shoppable TV Content Featuring Martha Stewart & Other Culinary Giants?

Last week, Walmart and Roku announced a deal that would allow TV viewers watching streaming via a Roku device to purchase items – including food items – using their remote.

According to the announcement, the new experience will allow customers to click on and purchase items advertised within the “moments of entertainment” (translation: during an actual show and not an explicit commercial), as well as during commercial breaks during ad-supported programming.

The new integration will allow viewers to click on a shoppable ad and proceed to checkout. The customer’s payment information will be pre-populated from Roku Pay, Roku’s payments platform, and then the customer taps “OK” on the Walmart checkout page to place the order. A Walmart purchase confirmation is emailed to the customer.

By taking shoppable commerce to the TV screen, Walmart is going beyond the shoppable integrations the company has previously done through partnerships with SideChef and Tasty. While the rise of video-centric social media platforms is blurring the lines, TV watching (including streaming) typically is a much different experience than time spent in front of our computers doing activities like online shopping.

For Roku, the move builds on an impressive ad business which saw the company garner the bulk of its $734 million in Q1 non-hardware revenue via advertising sales. The core of the company’s ad business is done via its Oneview Platform, which does ad-targeting of consumers based on their viewing behavior and allows Roku to deliver ads interspersed into shows on its own channel and via streaming partners that do have ad-supported content (like, say, Hulu) that open up ad inventory to Roku.

This deal is interesting on its own, but it becomes much more intriguing considering Roku’s recent big bet on original cooking content featuring names like Martha Stewart, Emeril Lagasse, and Christopher Kimball. That news was unveiled in May at Roku’s 2022 NewFronts when the streaming company announced co-production deals with Marquee Brands and Milk Street Studios to produce seven new streaming shows exclusively for the Roku Channel.

Why are the two deals, when considered together, much more interesting than on their own? Because while Roku can theoretically insert commerce-conversion opportunities for Walmart or other partners in ads on other streaming channels, the streaming company can go much deeper with commerce integrations on its channel where it has the full rights to the content and owns all the ad inventory.

Some of those deeper integrations might include in-show shopping moments. For example, imagine watching “Martha Cooks” or “Milk Street’s My Family Recipe” (two of the new shows on Roku TV) and seeing Martha or Christopher Kimball showing off a new holiday recipe. The Roku platform would allow a call to action overlay within the show itself where viewers could click via their remote to view the food items in the recipe, add them to a cart, and a transaction to be completed there on the spot.

While the Walmart and the new show slate are technically different deals, I would be shocked if Roku wasn’t pushing the possibilities around in-show commerce when negotiating with Martha, Emeril and Kimball. Conversely, the timing of the Walmart shoppable ad partnership is giving Roku a premium grocery partner just as the streaming company is beefing up its food and cooking content.

Longer-term, I would imagine other streaming partners like Hulu or even Netflix (which is considering ad content) would be open to enabling in-show commerce on shows on their channel via Roku’s platform. Roku has over 60 million viewers using its platform, giving it one of the largest addressable audiences in the world of streaming. If they can tie all the pieces together and bring more streamer partners on board, the company could position itself as a true TV commerce power player.

With New Funding Mustard Adds More Relish to the Food Ordering Experience

For hungry L.A. diners unable to decide between the Caliente Burger from Tommy’s in Van Nuys and Yukdaehang from a Korean restaurant in Los Angeles, Mustard may be the perfect video condiment. The Mustard app allows users to browse, compare, select, order, and have their food delivered from a vast cornucopia of eat-it-now options. And one cannot deny the mukbang element of watching others salivate over their spicy ramen bowls.

“People are discouraged by the food ordering process,” Mustard CEO Diana Might said in an interview with The Spoon. “The format of menu ordering is outdated.”

Inspired by an uptick in food delivery during the pandemic, Might and her co-founder Chief Product Officer David Currant recognized an opportunity to give social media users an easy soup-to-nuts process to order food. It starts with a video showcasing a given menu item and ends with the ability to select a delivery service to bring it to their home in short order. The videos are uploaded by what Might call “influencers” to the Mustard platform where the content is “Mustardized” and then, for now, returned to the author for uploading to social media. The result is a clip that allows the customer to see the duck meat, Wagyu beef, or bagel up close and personal with a narration from the video creator. An icon allows the viewer to click and order what they see on the screen.

Currant explains that Mustard’s technology uses several distinct data feeds that show the restaurant’s location, menu item, price, and delivery providers. Not willing to divulge the company’s secret sauce, which combines these varied data points, Currant acknowledges the use of computer vision and that the company’s platform is extensible to other areas such as travel.

Mustard is off to a good start, recently securing a $1 million investment from Operate Studio, Newfund, Great North Ventures, and Fund LA. “Mustard is disrupting the food industry by connecting food content consumption and IRL experiences together,” says Newfund’s Christy Wang, who believes Mustard has the potential to dominate the food vertical in the social video app space. “Food videos are mostly viewed and loved on social media, yet they are not actional and informative. Mustard closes the loop by integrating the ordering and booking process right at the moment of food content consumption, providing actionable menus and interactive food experiences within one video.”

Currently, the revenue model rewards content creators with a small affiliate fee, with Mustard getting paid based on the delivery service and their special promotions and offers. At this point, Might explains, the restaurants become the beneficiaries of the app but do not pay anything for the customer acquisition. Soon, the CEO says, that could change.

The company hopes to make its service even more user-friendly by eliminating the friction in the delivery process. Now, an influencer uploads its video to Mustard to be mustardized (tagged with price, restaurant location, delivery service, etc..). The same influencer uploads it to social media—most often Tik-Tok or Instagram. Might says it won’t be long before videos can be sent directly to Tik-Tok from the Mustard platform.

In theory, Mustard is available worldwide but is focused on the 8,000 restaurants in the Los Angeles area with more than 1,000 active users. The initial goal is to expand into other parts of southern California and grow organically throughout the United States.

Innit Teams Up With Google Cloud To Power Personalized Shopping

Smart kitchen and personalized shopping software startup Innit announced today they have partnered with Google Cloud. The new strategic partnership will help “grocery retailers to deliver personalized services across the entire meal journey, spanning online, in-store, and at home.”

This isn’t the first time the two companies have worked together. Innit was part of Google’s CES Demo in 2018, complete with a Tyler Florence cooking demo , and in 2019 the two announced a partnership with contract manufacturer Flex. Today’s news is an expansion of their collaboration into digitizing the grocery shopping experience.

Google “has been working with us to put together a solution targeting grocery retail,” said Innit CEO Kevin Brown via a Zoom interview this week. “Innit is a vertical market expert in food and recipes and nutrition and how it all comes together. AWe essentially combined the Innit capabilities with the Google capabilities to power grocery stores to have a much better digital experience with our consumers.”

At an execution level, Google Cloud will leverage Innit’s food and shopper data to help grocery stores to deliver more personalized experiences such as custom shopping lists built around recipes or dietary preferences. This could mean personalized recommendations for a shopper or building a custom meal kit around a recipe.

The partnership is part of a multiyear move by Innit into grocery shopping digitization which began with the company’s acquisition of Shopwell. Shopwell helped to round out Innit’s platform, which was initially focused on guided cooking and the in-kitchen consumer experience, and put them into conversation with grocers. The move paid off for Innit and help them snag a deal with Carrefour last year to power the large European grocery retailer’s personalized nutrition score initiative.

It also was one of the first moves by a smart kitchen software player to create digital grocery platforms.

I asked Brown why many of the smart kitchen players have focused on grocery in recent years.

“We’re excited about the future of that (connected kitchen), but it happens that sort of hardware speed,” said Brown.

“We see that as one of the anchor pieces over time, but right now, there’s a huge focus on the front end of that. Of how do I deal with all the wellness and health issues? How do I find the right products? How do I shop? And so that’s where we basically put all of the building blocks together of the past several years to finally be able to embed that into the shopping experience itself and carry people all the way through.”

It’s the second move by the Google Cloud team into the consumer cooking and meal journey experience over the past couple of weeks. On August 19th, the company had announced a partnership with GE Appliances to build next-gen smart home appliances. One has to wonder if the flurry of digital food and kitchen deals is part of a broader effort by the cloud giant to grow its market share in the consumer food and lifestyle vertical in the coming years by focusing on next-gen digital and AI powered solutions.

Recipe Sharing App Whisk an Early Test Partner for TikTok’s New Jump Program

This week TikTok officially launched its Jump program, a new feature which allows third party apps to integrate with the hugely popular social video app. The new integration allows someone watching a TikTok video to click on a button to access features of apps directly from inside TikTok

Recipe sharing app Whisk is an early integration partner with TikTok, which makes sense since cooking is one of TikTok’s most popular genres. The partnership, which Techcrunch wrote about in February, started as part of an “alpha testing” trial with a small group of TikTok creators that Whisk helped identify. With today’s announcement, the feature is being rolled out to wider group of creators (though not all). TikTok said it will roll out the feature more widely after some testing.

The TikTok-Whisk integration, which you can see in action above, works like this: TikTok users who are watching a cooking video can tap a Save to Whisk button that will allow them to view the recipe in Whisk. Users can also add the recipe to a collection or a meal plan, or have the recipe converted to a shopping list they could have delivered via one of Whisk’s grocery delivery partners (e.g., Walmart, Instacart).

For Whisk’s part, the integration is a no-brainer and could be a huge source of potential traffic for the recipe app. Whisk, which is now part of Samsung, was already growing pretty quickly; connecting its app with TikTok’s hugely popular cooking content will only accelerate that growth.

Looking forward, chances are other food and recipe apps will follow Whisk’s lead as TikTok opens up its program more widely for integration. Social media is where many consumers look for their next meal idea, and the social video app has become a viral recipe kingmaker. With Jump, recipe app makers now can monetize that viral interest in baked feta pasta by converting social video watchers to customers through shoppable recipes.

CES 2021: Samsung’s SmartThings App Adding Shoppable Recipe and Guided Cooking

Samsung announced today that it will be adding shoppable recipes, guided cooking and more such functionality to its SmartThings Cooking mobile app.

The added functionality is powered by Whisk’s Food AI (Samsung NEXT acquired Whisk in March of 2019), some of which has been available as part of the Family Hub software found in Samsung appliances.

With today’s news, smartphone users with the SmartThings Cooking app will be able to:

  • Get personalized recipe recommendations based on taste, preferences as well as what is immediately available.
  • Shop for ingredients and other food through the Whisk network of retailers including Walmart, Kroger, Instacart and Amazon Fresh.
  • Guided cooking instructions along with automatic temperature controls sent out to synced Samsung cooking appliances.

This could be the year where shoppable recipes and appliance integration take off. We are coming off a record year of online grocery shopping, thanks to the pandemic, so more people than ever are accustomed to buying groceries, including perishables, online. So the logical next step is tying together all of the threads in the meal journey: discovery, selection, access and instruction.

Samsung’s integrating functionality does all that and extends it now to the mobile phone. Of course, taking advantage of all of these new features means that you have to buy into the Samsung ecosystem and get all your appliances from the same maker.

As CES is kicking off this week, there will be a slew of kitchen appliance related announcements. Given how much online grocery shopping took off last year, and its projected growth over the coming years, I wonder how much more shopping integration we’ll see.

SideChef Now Offers Shoppable Recipes Through Walmart

Smart kitchen platform SideChef revealed to The Spoon this week that it is now offering shoppable recipe fulfillment through Walmart.

Consumers using SideChef’s app and website can now buy all the ingredients for a recipe with one click and choose from more than 3,300 Walmart stores across the U.S. for curbside pickup or delivery.

Right now, there are 150 shoppable recipes available on SideChef, but that number will bloom to more than 10,000 recipes later this month and in time for the holidays. In addition to shopping directly for recipe ingredients, customers will be able to adjust serving sizes, swap brands, and convert cooking units, as well as see the percentage of each product used so they know what leftovers they will have.

After being dormant for a while, the shoppable recipe space is suddenly seeing a flurry of activity. In July Thermomix launched shoppable recipes through its Cookidoo platform. In August, Swedish shoppable recipe company Northfork (which also works with Walmart) raised $1.1 million. And just last month, Fexy Media sold off its Serious Eats and Simply Recipes to DotDash in order to focus more on its shoppable recipe platform.

Why are shoppable recipes suddenly so hot? Could be because that most of us are still stuck at home, thanks to the global pandemic. Online grocery shopping has shot through the roof, thanks to COVID and improved fulfillment systems from grocery retailers. In fact, the grocery e-commerce sector is expected to hit $250 billion in sales by 2025, so there is plenty of opportunity for shoppable recipe providers like SideChef to get in on the ground floor, as it were, to capitalize on this long-term growth.

Partnering with Walmart, and it’s massive retail footprint, could help push shoppable recipes more into the mainstream. With winter coming and more people stuck at home, there could be a greater need for recipe discovery to mix up any meal monotony that might have set in. Nearly 90 percent of U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Walmart, so shoppable recipes is sitting right in the middle of a Venn diagram of audience and immediate action.

For it’s part, SideChef hasn’t been a slouch itself over this past year. The company’s app landed on Facebook’s Portal smart assistant, and launched a premiums subscription service. To learn more about SideChef and shoppable recipes, check out this deep dive interview with the company’s founder, Kevin Yu, over at Spoon Plus (subscription required).

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.

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.

Shoppable Recipe Service Northfork Raises $1.1M

Northfork, a Swedish company that enables shoppable recipes online, announced yesterday that it has raised 10 million Swedish Krona (~$1.1 million USD). The round was led by J12 Ventures with participation from DHS.

Northfork creates a white label platform for retailers to create shoppable recipes. For example, last year Northfork provided the software that powered BuzzFeed Tasty’s shoppable recipes through Walmart. As we wrote at the time of that announcement:

The [Tasty] app maps a user’s location to the nearest Walmart and is tied into that’s store’s inventory to ensure that customers can get all the ingredients necessary. The app even lets users swap out items based on quantity needed or dietary, nutritional or brand preferences. Once purchased, the groceries can be scheduled for delivery or pickup as early as that same day.

The shoppable recipe space has actually been kind of quiet for most of this year. In July Thermomix announced shoppable ingredients through its Cookidoo platform (powered by Whisk), and in June Innit announced a shoppable recipe related partnership with product data company, SPINS.

This relative quiet in the shoppable recipe space is curious, given that the COVID-19 pandemic has spurred record amounts of online grocery shopping. With so many more people eating at home, you’d think there would be more activity around connecting meal discovery through recipes and e-commerce solutions that make buying those ingredients easier.

Perhaps that’s part of the reason Northfork raised this money. According to Nordic 9, Northfork will use this new money for product development and U.S. expansion.

Thermomix Users Can Now Order Ingredients With Launch of Shoppable Recipes on Cookidoo

Thermomix announced today they have launched ingredient shopping on the Cookidoo, the Thermomix multicooker’s digital recipe and meal planning platform.

The new capability allows Thermomix users to add a recipe’s ingredients to a digital shopping list and order them through the Cookidoo app. Fulfillment of the order (delivery or pickup) is done through a third-party grocery retail partner of the shopper’s choosing.

The new shoppable recipe feature will be available to users of any Cookidoo-compatible Thermomix model (TM5, TM6 and TM31) in the U.S., Germany and the United Kingdom.

You can watch how it works on the video below:

Those using the TM6 can add ingredients from any of the 50,000 or so recipes available through the Cookidoo interface by simply clicking on the “Add to Shopping List” option directly on the appliance’s touchscreen. From there, they head over to the Cookidoo mobile app or website to review the list, remove items they may already have, and add additional items to the list. They can then select a grocery retailer or online grocery service provider like Instacart to fulfill the order.

According to Thermomix’s head of consumer experience, Ramona Wehlig, bringing ingredient shopping and delivery to the users of the Thermomix completes the meal journey for their users.

“We had the weekly planner and curated shopping lists,” Wehlig said by phone, “but we never closed the gap in the meal journey until the ingredients were delivered.”

Wehlig said the company has been developing shoppable recipe functionality for the past year and a half. The company started trialing an early version capability through pilots in Germany. These initial pilots, which used technology developed by Thermomix, helped the company to understand the digital grocery shopping process and to fine-tune the ability to do things such as ingredient matching.

However, as the company pushed to accelerate its shoppable recipes efforts, it started looking for a partner to help them scale. This brought them to Whisk, a shoppable recipe and digital food platform startup acquired by Samsung Next last year. Whisk powers a number of grocery commerce capabilities in the connected kitchen, including (not surprisingly) on the Samsung Family Hub fridges.

“The core aim [of working with Whisk] was to scale faster,” said Wehlig. “This allows us to connect our users with more grocery stores in a shorter time frame.”

For Whisk, the addition of Thermomix helps cement an already strong position as one of the primary shoppable recipe platforms. While I haven’t seen updated numbers for a while, back in 2018 Whisk told me its platform touched 20 million users each month. With the addition of Thermomix — first in Germany, the U.K. and the U.S., later globally — the company will get millions more.

For Thermomix, the integration of shopping capabilities from the Cookidoo digital recipe platforms opens up potential new revenue streams through various forms of partnerships with CPG brands and any commissions passed on from the third party grocery platforms. For users, it adds another nice feature and could entrench the Cookidoo recipe platform as their primary digital shopping list manager.