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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

shoppable recipes

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.

Just in Time for Sheltering in Place, Anycart Launches its Shoppable Recipe Service

One of my wife’s greatest talents during this time of sheltering in place is her ability to make actual meals from whatever we have in the pantry. This may sound mundane, but given the state of the world, our pantry is stocked with lots of dry and canned goods at the moment and last minute one-off trips to the grocery store aren’t in the cards.

If you’re stuck in a similar situation, you may want to check out Anycart, a new online shoppable recipe service that launched in the U.S. over this past weekend.

Instead of shopping for individual food items, Anycart lets you shop for meals that appeal to you and your family. Those include Easy Chicken Swimming Rama, Chicken Thighs with Hummus and Cucumbers, and Homemade Easy Mac and Cheese. Select the meal you want and all the ingredients for it are sent to a participating grocery store near you (Safeway, Albertsons, etc.) for fulfillment and delivery or pickup.

This is where meal shopping in the age of COVID-19 is a double-edged sword. More of us are shopping for groceries online more than ever, but that also means grocers can be overloaded, especially for delivery. Case in point: I tested Anycart this morning, picking meals and designating a Safeway as the fulfillment location. Anycart said my order would be delivered sometime between today and Saturday (with some caveats to get them out of fulling committing to that time). However, a quick check on Safeway (and personal experience with my local store) shows it doesn’t have any delivery times available until after Saturday, April 5. The only pickup option for me was an hour away .

This is partially a quirk of the more rural area where I live , but delivery delays are probably not uncommon as online grocery orders surge in this time of staying at home. Part of the appeal and promise of shoppable recipes is that you can be inspired by a new type of cuisine and then act on it. But if there is a huge delay between inspiration and action, then the shoppable recipe loses some of its lustre. That Caprese Grain Bowl with Avocado might sound good on Monday, but if you can’t make it until Saturday, you palate might have moved on.

The whole shoppable recipe space was pretty hot a couple years back with Fexy Media and Myxx providing similar offerings, and BuzzFeed’s Tasty partnered with Walmart for shoppable recipes last year. But it’s not a space that we hear a lot about or see a lot of action. Perhaps if the grocery e-commerce boom we are currently in sustains beyond this time of sheltering in place, shoppable recipes will become more central to the e-commerce experience. Who knows, even my wife may start using them.

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.

Nutrient App Lets You Create a Personalized Meal Plan and Order Groceries

Oftentimes, meal planning services only provide one piece of the strategic cooking puzzle. They’ll help you decide what recipes to make for the week, but you’re often left on your own figuring out what you already have in your pantry and fridge and doing the actual shopping for ingredients part.

Startup Nutrient is trying to make meal planning a more streamlined process — one that’s also tailored to your specific dietary goals. Users go to the Nutrient website or download the app. They’re prompted to fill in a short questionnaire to determine what sort of calorie intake and nutrients best suit their lifestyle and goals. The app also takes into account any dining restrictions (meat-free, etc.). Nutrient then generates a meal plan of healthy recipes, all of which are developed internally.

From there, users can either download a shopping list or buy them through online grocery service FreshDirect, which they can do without leaving the Nutrient ecosystem. The Pantry page also lets users input what’s in their pantry and fridge, so the app can omit ingredients you already have from shopping lists or suggest recipes featuring ingredients it knows you have on hand.

Founded in Prague, the startup recently moved to New York City to attend the Food-X Accelerator. In the U.S. Nutrient is piloting its technology with a small group of friends and family. When I spoke with Nutrient’s CEO Roman Kalista over the phone earlier this week, he told me it plans to launch in November in the New York City area where it will integrate with FreshDirect for grocery fulfillment and delivery. The company plans to continue operations in their native Czech Republic, where they still have around 1,500 users.

Nutrient isn’t the only meal planning service to integrate with online grocery fulfillment. In the U.K. Mucho works with grocery delivery service Ocado, and eMeals has partnered with Walmart, Kroger, Instacart and more for grocery fulfillment.

However, according to Kalista, their service is the only meal planning app that allows users to go through the entire process within the app ecosystem: finding recipes, grocery shopping, checking out, etc. He also said that many other services end up being super expensive because they do a poor job translating recipes into ingredient lists. Nutrient, however, promises to be so efficient with its shopping recipes that users can pay as little as $1.75 per serving for their groceries. The platform also breaks down price per serving so you can see how much your meals are costing.

For now, Nutrient makes money by adding a small markup to all of its groceries. As they grow across the country and add more grocery partners, Kalista told me they hope to switch the cost over to the retailer side.

It’s too early to tell if Nutrient can follow through on its promise to streamline the meal planning process. But the startup does hit on a few big trends we see a lot of at The Spoon: personalization, shoppable recipes, convenience, and food as medicine (which Kalista said they’ll incorporate more of in future iterations). Perhaps most importantly, Nutrient doesn’t lock users in. Unlike meal kits or certain recipe planning services, users can use the app for as often — or rarely — as they’d like.

After they finish the Food-X program, we’ll see if Nutrient can indeed deliver on its promise to be the all-in-one solution to meal planning.