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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

shoppable recipes

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.

BuzzFeed Tasty and Walmart Serve Up Shoppable Recipes

If you’ve ever been inspired by one of those seemingly simple, overhead cooking videos produced by BuzzFeed’s Tasty but then were crestfallen because you didn’t have all the ingredients, you’re in luck! Walmart announced today that it is bringing shoppable recipes to the Tasty platform, deepening the relationship between the two companies.

Right now, the shoppable recipes features works with the Tasty iOS app. Once a user finds a recipe they want to make they can view the list of ingredients and tap the “Add items to your grocery bag” button, which redirects them to either the Walmart Grocery app or online store.

The “shoppable” part of the recipes is being powered by Northfork‘s software, which provides a white label platform for grocery retailers. The 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.

Walmart’s relationship with Tasty goes back to December of 2017 when the two entered into an e-commerce agreement to sell the basic cookware and utensils needed to make Tasty dishes. In March of last year, that relationship expanded when the two partnered to sell an exclusive line of Tasty branded cookware. Shoppable recipes seemed like the logical next step in their relationship.

Tasty has been relatively quiet lately; the last we heard from them was in October of 2018 when Cuisinart launched a version of the Tasty OneTop cooktop. Adding to any mystery about what is going on with Tasty is the fact that it was announced last week that Ben Kaufman, who provided BuzzFeed’s quote for the Walmart press announcement, was stepping down from his role as BuzzFeed’s Chief Marketing Officer. As Variety reported at the time: “During [Kaufman’s] tenure at the digital-media company, he helped develop the Tasty line of products for Walmart and the Goodful brand at Macy’s.” Kaufman will now focus on the BuzzFeed Camp retail stores.

Regardless, the shoppable recipe sector continues apace. Samsung bought shoppable recipe site Whisk in March of this year, and just today, Mealthy announced it had equity crowdfunded $1.07 million for its full-stack consumer solution for shoppable recipes, guided cooking and kitchen appliances.

And it looks like Walmart and Tasty will have more announcements to come as today’s shoppable recipe press release says “This feature is the first of many upgrades to the Tasty app that will continue to deepen Tasty’s partnership with Walmart and sweeten the shopping experience for the Tasty audience.”

Myxx Shoppable Recipes Now Available at Walmart and Alberstons/Safeway Stores

Myxx announced today that it has added big grocery chains such as Walmart, Albersons, Safeway and more to its shoppable recipes platform. This expands Myxx’s reach to 10,000 stores nationwide, up from 1,500 previously.

Through its website, Myxx allows users to discover recipes and instantly shop for the ingredients necessary to make them. Myxx identifies a shopper’s local stores on the platform and features real-time pricing, including any sales and promotions. Once the recipes and ingredients have been decided, Myxx sends the consumer to the selected store’s site to complete the purchase and schedule pickup or delivery.

Shoppable recipes are a trend we’re following closely at The Spoon. If you can be inspired by a recipe, order all the ingredients and have them delivered on the same day, that recipe transforms from inert set of instructions into a discovery and commerce platform that CPG companies, retailers and more can make money off of.

Myxx isn’t the only company in the shoppable recipe, err, mix. Both Fexy Media and Whisk (which acquired Avocando) have partnered with Amazon for their shoppable recipe platforms, and Chicory works with CPG brands to make their recipes shoppable as well.

Earlier this year, Myxx formed a partnership with Kroger, and today’s additon of Walmart, Albertsons, Safeway Jewel Osco, Vons, Randalls, Tom Thumb, and H-E-B across the country obviously opens up to more people (just in time for Thanksgiving!).

But the real question now is if and how these new chains will drive awareness of Myxx’s service. The masses can only use shoppable recipes if they know of their existence. Dede Houston, Cofounder and COO of Myxx, told me that because the space is so new, they are at the beginning stages of talking with retailers about generating interest.

Thanksgiving is actually a great time to test out shoppable recipes: You have to make lots of different dishes, which can be complicated, and grocery stores are pretty packed as the day draws closer, so getting ingredients delivered saves you some time. Will you be trying shoppable recipes this season? Leave us a comment and let us know.

The Spoon Newsletter: European FoodTech Investment, Future of Grocery, SKS Vids

This is the post version of our weekly (twice-weekly, actually) newsletter. If you’d like to get the weekly Spoon in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

Catherine here! Pleasantly full from sampling Pizzametry’s pizza-making robot/vending machine, ready for a weeklong sojourn to Copenhagen to eat as many cinnamon rolls and fermented things as humanly possible.

Speaking of Europe, this week I spent a good chunk of time sifting through piles of data on the state of European food tech. Now, I’m not complaining — we at the Spoon love a good data sift, the nerdier the better. And we uncovered some interesting trends emerging across the Atlantic. Check out our distilled report to find out which companies, investors, and countries are forging the way in European food innovation.

There’s plenty of action right here in our own backyard, too. Take food delivery: a whopping $3.5 billion has been invested in startups in the space this year alone — and it’s only October.

We’re also seeing a lot of companies experimenting with delivery methods. Chris wrote about how Kiwi’s food delivery robots are rolling out in Los Angeles, which he thinks is a smarter play than Uber’s goal to start delivering your pad thai or chicken burrito via drone.

Outside of delivery, robots are also continuing their march into the restaurant space. Chinese hot pot chain Haidilao has teamed up with Panasonic to launch a Berlin location with a completely robot-run kitchen. Maybe good news for consumers, but bad news for people looking for entry-level restaurant jobs.

In the front of house, Jenn wrote about the partnership between Ordrslip, a company which powers mobile apps for restaurants, and payment software Square. Together, they can help smaller mom-and-pop eateries enter the age of mobile ordering and payments — something that’s becoming less of a nicety and more of a necessity.

Jenn also has the story about an epic Twitter thread from the founder of CircleUp about the future of grocery. Ryan Caldbeck’s seventeen-tweet thread told the story of a three hour conversation he had recently with an unnamed CEO of a large grocery chain. He provided a few key takeaways from the conversation, including how low-pricing is a losing strategy and how the old axiom “location is everything” holds less relevancy in an era of delivery-everywhere. What does matter? Product selection optimized by “non-commoditized data”. You can read Jenn’s post about Caldbeck’s thread here.

Also from this week: Chris wonders if 2019 could be the year that we move beyond traditional meat, as plant-based meat continues to gain popularity with vegetarians and flexitarians alike. It’ll be a while longer before the average person can sink their teeth into cell-based (also called cultured or clean) meat, however. In anticipation of its market launch, the USDA and FDA hosted a joint meeting earlier this week to discuss how they would label this emerging technology.

Oh yeah, one more thing: Our photos and video page from Smart Kitchen Summit 2018 is in. We have all our photos up and a bunch of videos (with most being up by next week), so check it out!

That’s all from me! Farvel (Danish for see ya later.)

Catherine

In the 10/26 edition:

Video: Richard Blais Wants to Make a Drone Delivery Service for Donuts
During his fireside chat at the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit, Richard Blais talks about his thoughts on the future of food technology in the restaurant and home kitchen: food delivery, robotics, and drone-delivered donuts.

Product Selection Will Drive Future Growth for Grocery, Says CircleUp’s CEO
Whether it’s about personalizing the shopping experience, changing the way stores are set up or shoppable recipes, most folks in the food industry have an opinion about what will drive future growth for grocery retailers. This week, another voice joined the conversation and offered a new take on where retailers should be looking in terms of future of grocery.

Haidilao and Panasonic Team Up for Robotic Hotpot Restaurant
Haidilao, which operates a hotpot restaurant chain, has partnered with Panasonic to open up a robot-run kitchen in Beijing on October 28. The new automated kitchen will reportedly be used to help Haidilao expand to up to 5,000 locations around the world.

Trendwatch: Is 2019 the Year We Move Beyond Traditional Meat?
Consumption of beef and chicken was estimated to hit a record high this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But traditional meat’s time at the top of the proverbial food chain may be nearing an end, if two new 2019 prediction pieces are to be believed. But how close is that to the truth?

Allergy Fears and Transparency Among Issues at latest USDA/FDA Meat-ing
Earlier this week, scientists, entrepreneurs, and concerned members of the public got together to discuss the future of cell-based (also called “cultured” and “lab-grown”) meat during a joint meeting put on by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). A big issue on the table: labeling.

Video: To Survive, the Future Kitchen Must be Personalized, Flexible, and Emotional
The first panel of the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) North America tackled the disrupted meal journey. Just after Jon Jenkins, Director of Engineering at Hestan Smart Cooking, Dana Cowin, former Editor in Chief of Food & Wine, and Michael Wolf kicked off SKS by discussing how the kitchen has to adjust if it will survive in the future.

Bee Vectoring Technology Uses Bees to Apply Pesticide on Crops
Bees are pretty remarkable creatures (once you get past all that stinging). They pollinate crops, make delicious honey, and if a Toronto-based agtech company, Bee Vectoring Technology, has its way, bees will be used to apply pesticides to crops to help ward off disease and increase yields.

$3.5 Billion Invested in Food Delivery Startups This Year
Investors have a big appetite for food delivery companies this year. The Wall Street Journal reports on Pitchbook data revealing that $3.5 billion has been invested in food and grocery delivery startups so far in 2018.

Kiwi Delivery Robots Expand into Los Angeles
If you live in the Westwood area of Los Angeles, you can see sunshine, the occasional movie star, and now delivery robots shuttling food to hungry local denizens. According to the Daily Bruin, Kiwi Campus started rolling out its delivery robots at the beginning of this month.

Cookitoo Brings Rental Kitchen Marketplace from Down Under to the Bay Area
Australian startup Cookitoo is bringing their online marketplace for underutilized kitchen space to the Bay Area, with hopes to expand into other U.S. cities over the next year and a half.

Podcast: Is The Recipe Dead?

At last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit, celebrity chef Tyler Florence declared “the recipe is dead!”

There’s no doubt the recipe is changing with the arrival of new technologies, cooking methods and content formats, so we decided to have a conversation about this at Smart Kitchen Summit Europe. This episode of the Smart Kitchen Show features a panel conversation featuring the BBC’s LuLu Grimes, Hestan Cue’s Jon Jenkins and Dishq’s Kishan Vasani. The panel, which was moderated by YouTube star Katie Quinn, includes discussion about personalization, guided cooking, shoppable recipes and much more. It’s a great podcast so make sure to listen.

You can see hear more about the future of the recipe, food personalization, recipe commerce and much more at Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle. Use discount code PODCAST for 25% off tickets.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking play above, download it using this link or subscribe to the Smart Kitchen Show on Apple podcasts. For those who prefer to watch the panel, you can watch the video of the session from Smart Kitchen Summit Europe below.

SKS Europe: Personalized, Shoppable and Guided: Recipes Are Not Dead

Miele Invests in Shoppable Recipe Startup, KptnCook

KptnCook, a Berlin-based shoppable recipe startup, today announced that it has received a “seven figure” investment from Miele Venture Capital, a subsidiary of Miele Group, the appliance making giant (and fellow German company). The investment is in US dollars and is the first round of venture funding for KptnCook.

As we wrote back in January, KptnCook is different from other startups in the shoppable recipe space:

KptnCook provides daily recipes to your phone, bundles together a shopping based on those ingredients, and using your location, points you to a nearby store where you can get all the ingredients.

But KptnCook bucks the recipe app trends in two ways. First, while it creates shoppable recipes, it sends you to real world stores to actually roam the aisles and make your purchases. You can’t order online, and there is no in-store order fulfillment.

Miele seems to be assembling the parts necessary to capture more of the European consumer meal journey. Miele itself makes kitchen appliances, including the new high-end Dialog oven, which uses radio frequency solid state technology for extreme precision cooking. Then last month, Miele announced it had invested in MChef (another German startup) to launch a specialized food delivery service for Dialog oven users. Dialog’s technology allows it to cook multiple MChef meals at once.

As with the MChef deal, there aren’t a lot of details as to how KptnCook will be integrated into any Miele offering. But there doesn’t need to be a ton of integration for Miele to realize value out of this investment.

By investing in KptnCook, Miele gains data and valuable insight into the specific recipes that consumers choose, how often they shop, where they shop, the ingredients they buy, etc.. At the very least, this data could inform what type of meals MChef should create for Dialog customers. Further down, these shopping insights could set Miele up for a more direct version of shoppable recipes complete with online grocery ordering and delivery (right now, KptnCook says that just 1 percent of Germans shop for groceries online).

KptnCook wouldn’t provide any stats around its app usage, which leads me to believe it’s not that high. An investment from Miele could provide a nice marketing boost via the appliance maker’s existing sales channel. For its part, KptnCook said it would use the investment money to build out its marketing and product teams, and double its headcount to 20 people.

Elsewhere in KptnCook’s world, Co-Founders Eva Hoefer and Alex Reeg told me that their app now works with Alexa. Once enabled the Amazon voice assistant will walk users through making recipes step-by-step.

Campbells Gets Into Shoppable Recipes

Campbell’s announced last week that it has added shoppable recipe functionality to its site, in another move that has the iconic soup brand playing a broadening role in our meal journey.

Available now, the shoppable recipes are created using Chicory’s AI technology. Once you pick a recipe on Campbell’s website, you can click the “Get Ingredients” button at the bottom, enter your zip code and select your preferred grocer for delivery. Right now, Campbell’s works with retailers including AmazonFresh, Peapod, Instacart, Meijer, Walmart, and Wakefern.

If there’s one big trend we’re following here at The Spoon this year, it’s the evolution of the recipe into a robust discovery and e-commerce platform. Online grocery shopping and same-day delivery mean that midday recipe inspiration can be turned into dinner that very night. Shoppable recipes are quickly becoming the industry standard as SideChef, Fexy Media and AllRecipes have launched shoppable recipe programs.

And now Campbell’s wants in on this action. With this move, Campbell’s doesn’t just want to be a part of your meal, it wants to be a vehicle that delivers your whole meal, and generate revenue along the way.

Prior to this, Campbell’s invested $10 million in meal kit company Chef’d, and then teamed up with them to form its own line of slow-cooker meal kits.

Meanwhile, companies like Chicory and Whisk are taking advantage of the shoppable recipe boom by providing the back-end technology which enables food and recipe brands to enable immediate purchase via thousands of recipes. In addition to Campbell’s, Chicory also provides shoppable recipe tech for brands such as Betty Crocker and Time Inc.

SideChef Integrates with Amazon Fresh for Shoppable Recipes

Guided cooking startup, SideChef, announced today that it will soon be facilitating shoppable recipes through a collaboration with Amazon Fresh.

Starting this August, SideChef users who are also Amazon Prime members and subscribe to Amazon Fresh will be able to get same-day or next-day delivery of ingredients from more than 5,000 recipes available in the SideChef app. This integration will be available to “major cities” across the U.S..

A SideChef spokesperson told me that when a user finds a recipe that they want to make, there will be a one-button experience to add all the ingredients to a shopping list in Amazon Fresh. From Amazon Fresh, users can edit the list if they already have certain ingredients and proceed with the checkout.

From the language used in the announcement, this doesn’t appear to be an official partnership between SideChef and Amazon. Instead they are referring to it as an “integrated collaboration.” Amazon Fresh has turned into a go-to vehicle to enable shoppable recipes. Fexy, AllRecipes and Whisk have all integrated similar ingredient purchasing options through Amazon in the past year. Perhaps Amazon’s patent for recipe-driven commerce has something to do with it.

We’ve been saying that the recipe is more important than ever and will become the center of the kitchen as it evolves to become a discovery and commerce platform. As Amazon, Walmart, Target and Albertsons all ramp up same-day delivery efforts, recipe providers like SideChef will be able to turn meal inspiration into (relatively) immediate action. Expect more shopping options to pop up on SideChef’s platform to enable customers to shop from their own favorite grocery brand.

This isn’t SideChef’s first foray into commerce, it has an existing collaboration with Chef’d to deliver meal kits based on hundreds of recipes in the SideChef app. SideChef has also been ramping up activity on the guided cooking side, integrating its software platform into LG and Sharp appliances.

If you’re curious about the future of shoppable recipes, you can learn all about them at our Smart Kitchen Summit in Dublin Ireland in June.

Whisk Acquires Avocando to Expand Shoppable Recipe Capabilities

Whisk, the UK-based AI food platform, announced today that it has acquired German startup, Avocando. The move augments Whisk’s shoppable recipe business by expanding the company’s footprint into continental Europe and adding some sizable appliance partners to the company’s partner roster.

As we’ve noted, the recipe is evolving from a static list of instructions and into a discovery and commerce platform. Whisk partners with publishers such as Pillsbury, the BBC and Food network to connect their recipes with retailers. So if you find a pancake recipe that you really like on Food Network, Whisk makes it easy to order all the necessary ingredients. In the U.S., Whisk works with Walmart and Peapod and recently added Amazon Fresh.

Avocando, which launched in 2015 and raised just €1m, has built a shoppable recipe platform that has found traction with publishers and appliance makers in Germany, Austria and France. According to the announcement, the company powers 600,000 shoppable recipes and reaches 20 million monthly shoppers across Germany and Europe.

By acquiring Avocando, Whisk picks up the startup’s user and customer base, which include food publisher Chefkoch and German appliance makers Miele and BSH Home Appliances. With two of Germany’s biggest appliance makers now in the fold, Whisk – who had its own integration with Samsung’s Family Hub – has started to tally an impressive list of hardware partners.

Terms of the acquisition weren’t made available, though Whisk CEO Nick Holzherr told The Spoon that they paid cash for the company out of revenue from continuing operations.  Whisk was founded in 2012, has 22 employees and raised $2 million in seed funding. The Avocando team will be joining Whisk.

With Chef’d Deal, Innit Moves Closer to Customized Shoppable Recipes

Innit yesterday announced a partnership with Chef’d to provide ordering and guided cooking of meal kits directly through the Innit app. The deal is the first meal commerce offering for Innit and points towards a future for the company where it becomes more of an all-in-one platform that helps users discover, buy and prepare customizeable meals.

In it’s earlier incarnation, Innit allowed users to customize its recipes based on ingredients they already had. Don’t have steak for these fajitas? Here’s how to make it with chicken. The app then serves up short videos to show users exactly how to slice, stir and sear your meal. Since then it has added integration with smart appliances from LG to do more of the work when preparing dinner.

But Innit recognizes that recipes are now actionable discovery and commerce platforms. In a perfect world (at least here at The Spoon), we could be inspired by a recipe, customize it to our taste, order all the ingredients and have them delivered to our house that same day.

The Chef’d deal isn’t there yet, but inches us a little bit closer to that future. Innit users will now notice a new “meal kit” option in the app. Tapping it brings up list of Chef’d meal kits that have been curated and developed in conjunction with Innit. Select your kit, delivery date and choose to pay for it all within the app. Once your Chef’d box arrives, Innit walks you through how to make it.

This kind of guided cooking helps alleviate one of the pain points we’ve found with meal kits — preparation. Sure, it’s easy to receive a box containing all the right ingredients, but doing all the work of cooking is still… work. With Chef’d, Innit helps trim the prep time by providing some ingredients pre-measured (think: herbs and spices), and helps make sure you don’t waste your money by showing you how to make that meal properly.

That’s a good first step, but it still doesn’t help connect my inspiration with immediate action. When I went through the ordering process today, the earliest delivery I could get was about a week out. I may be craving Thai Red Curry Ribs right now — but who knows how I’ll feel in a week? Additionally, you can’t get any Innit recipe as a meal kit, it’s limited to 19 options priced between $8.25 and $21.75 per serving.

Joshua Sigel, Innit COO is aware of this and told me the company is moving towards full commerce capabilities. “The goal is to make more of our meals purchasable as a meal kit, or as a shopping list to get from a local grocery store.” Sigel wouldn’t provide specifics but said we could look forward to more retail and other partnerships in the future.

For it’s part, Chef’d now adds another partner arrow to its quiver. Chef’d has been focused on becoming a platform to enable meal kits for the likes of Coca-Cola, Hershey’s, and Campbell’s. The company is also rolling out its own branded meal kits at Costco. Hooking up with Innit opens up Chef’d to an additional early adopter market (though Innit won’t say how many people are using its app), and with a company actively looking to innovate meal kits.

I may be over meal kits, but I’m intrigued by this partnership and want to see how it goes. If Innit’s platform can prove flexible enough, and it can secure the right partnerships, it’s easy to see this evolving from pre-fab meal kits right now, to truly customized shopping and guided cooking kits in the near future.