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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

shoppable recipes

The eMeals/Meredith Partnership Brings Even More Simplicity and Variety to Home Cooking

Busy parents and uncreative chefs alike constantly grapple with the question of what to make for dinner.

Jane DeLaney and Jenny Cochran created eMeals partially to help answer that question in the form of a subscription-based meal planning, budgeting, and shopping service. You tell the app what you want for dinner, and it offers a variety of plans to choose from.

But even us busy folks want to try something new once in a while, and eMeals just made that possible on top of everything else it offers. Just today, the company announced a partnership with publishing powerhouse Meredith Corporation. Together, the two companies will integrate select Meredith brands with the eMeals app by providing users with recipes hand-picked by editors.

Through the partnership, eMeals users will get access to additional recipes curated by editors at Allrecipes, Better Homes & Gardens, and EatingWell. Those recipes will be available through the eMeals platform, just like any other. At the same time, readers of those publications will get a chance to experience the simplicity of the eMeals platform. eMeals CEO Forrest Collier broke it down simply when we spoke on the phone: “[The partnership] gives their users a different way to access the content in a more practical way. And for our users, it gives them even more options.”

That means an eMeals user on the Classic Meals plan could toggle back and forth between those options and the ones from the EatingWell feed. Or a diabetic user could get a much simpler, more streamlined look at Allrecipes (which is enormous) to find new and interesting dishes that also fit within their dietary needs.

Other elements of the eMeals service will remain the same. You’ll still be able to add extra household staples like milk and toothpaste to your orders, and those orders will still be available for delivery or pickup, if you so desire.

As I recently wrote, eMeals is something of a cross between a meal kit and a creating dinner from scratch. Collier calls the company “Meal Kit 2.0,” or “the meal kit alternative.” As he noted during our conversation, a lot of people simply don’t want to pay $10 per person for dinner multiple times a week. He also points to the oft-debated issue of how “convenient” a meal kit actually is: “For a lot of [people], the recipes lean more difficult. Even though someone cut up your garlic cloves, it’s still a lot of steps, a lot of ingredients.”

And sure, with a service like eMeals, no one’s going to measure out your teaspoon of curry powder for you. But with many plans, the recipes can be considerably simpler to put together. For example, this week’s Quick features six dinners that take no more than 30 minutes total, along with one slow-cooker stew. Several recipes repeat ingredients, as well. “We give all the convenience. We solve the affordability, we solve the variety,” says Collier, adding that “everything in the grocery store is a possibility.”

The partnership with Meredith also addresses an entirely different issue, which is curation. For some people, even sitting down to pick through the many plans eMeals offers is a time burden. So editors basically telling you what you can or should eat simplifies the process even more without sacrificing the variety eMeals is known for.

Whether this type of platform becomes the new standard in meal planning is yet to be determined. But seeing as I can use it to choose food, buy ingredients, get them delivered, and get the blessing of Better Homes & Gardens without ever leaving my armchair, I’d say eMeals has taken a big step in ushering in the future of recipes.

Smart Kitchen News Roundup: Personalized Pints, The World’s Best Steak, & Ranch Dressing

It’s been a big week for the smart kitchen, so we’re doing a quick roundup of some of our favorite food tech news stories that we didn’t have time to turn into full pieces.

Speaking of smart kitchens: we just returned from the Housewares Show in Chicago! If you want to read about some of the cool new products and trends we saw (cough, guided cooking, cough), check out this post and look out for a recap podcast coming your way soon.

Introducing Beer Ripples

Beer Ripples lets you personalize your pints

Just in time for St. Patrick’s day, latte art-printing company Coffee Ripples is bringing their technology behind the bar. Their edible 3D-printing technology allows you to print any imagine that moves you on a pint. Dubbed Beer Ripples, the machine, intended solely for commercial use, uses an edible malt-based ink to transfer designs, text, and images onto your brew’s foamy top. Imbibers can either choose from options on Ripples’ library or upload a custom image onto the Ripple app using their foam. It’s not cheap—the machine is priced at $3,000 plus an $1,500 annual subscription fee—but in a world run by Instagram, it may help give bars an extra buzz.

 

Photo: Hidden Valley website.

Hidden Valley dips into Allrecipes/Amazon Fresh partnership

This week the media and marketing company the Meredith Corporation announced that Hidden Valley will be the first advertising partner to take advantage of the Allrecipes/Amazon Fresh integration. Now when users select shoppable recipes from Allrecipes that call for bottled ranch or powdered ranch mix, a Hidden Valley product will automatically be added to their AmazonFresh shopping cart and delivered to their doorstep. In addition to geo-targeted offers and ads, users will see a “May We Suggest” native recipe integrations pushing Hidden Valley ranch as a pairing whenever they click on pizza recipes. Customers can switch out Hidden Valley for another brand if they wish, but this partnership is just a taste of how CPG’s will use shoppable recipes as a tool to take advantage of the growing egrocery market.

 

Photo: Crowd Cow website.

Crowd Cow expands to Japan

Crowd Cow, the startup which helps people directly source meat by crowdfunding a cow online, has expanded their reach into Japan. They now offer A5 Wagyu beef sourced from Kagoshima, a rare cut of meat which their website claims is “the world’s most marbled steak.” This expansion shows that Crowd Cow’s model of direct-delivering specific cuts of whole cows has some market power behind it. It also speaks to the growing demand for ethically sourced luxury beef. If you’re interested, Crowd Cow’s A5 Wagyu will go on sale on March 19th, and promises to sell out pretty quickly. Get your Béarnaise sauce ready.

 

Photo: SmartQ website.

SmartQ gets funding to facilitate food court experience

This week the Chennai-based food tech startup SmartQ raised $1 million from Dubai-based investors. Founded in 2014, SmartQ aims to eliminate cafeteria lines by “digitizing food courts.” Their suite of products includes a food ordering app, a self ordering kiosk, and a POS system to facilitate restaurant billing. While keeping all of those services straight may seem more complicated than just waiting in line, SmartQ’s products are catching on in food courts around India. The company has been growing 50% month to month, and currently has big players Shell and Epsilon as clients. SmartQ hopes to use their funding to grow their business outside of India.

 

Photo: PR Newswire Asia

2018 AWE wowed with smart kitchen appliances

Smart kitchen gadgets abounded this week at the 2018 Appliance & Electronics World Expo (AWE) in Shanghai this week. Consumer appliance manufacturer Midea showed off some pretty snazzy demos appliances like their second generation Fun oven, which uses AI and machine learning to recognize foods and calculate the perfect cooking curve. There was also a voice-controlled microwave and a range hood with steam cleaning and air purification capabilities. Also at AWE, Chinese appliance company Haier debuted their smart home solution, featuring a smart fridge with a built-in camera which can see your food and recommend recipes accordingly.

This Menu-Planning Service Eliminates the Stress of Deciding What’s for Dinner

Somewhere between meal kits and planning dinner from scratch sit recipe-planning apps—you still cook the food, but you don’t have to create the dish from scratch. It’s cheaper than a meal kit, but you still have to shop for and prep the ingredients.

Two busy moms (who are also sisters) recently took this concept a step further when they created eMeals, a subscription-based menu, budgeting, and shopping plan. It’s basically shoppable recipes on steroids: you tell the app your meal preferences and dietary needs/restrictions; it tells you what to cook for the next seven days and how much the ingredients will cost. If you want to skip the shopping step, you can also choose to have those ingredients delivered or available for pickup at your grocery store.

Users choose the week’s recipes from several different plans: weight management (Paleo, portion control), dietary restrictions (diabetes, gluten intolerance), family meals, and slow cooker meals are just a few of the options.

Once you’ve selected the recipes, the app turns your menu into a shopping list of ingredients. You can also add your odds and ends, like toothpaste or milk, to that list. The rest is easy: select the number of people you want to cook for (up to 6) and your preferred grocery store.

Prices for the service vary based on how long you choose to commit: $29.99 for three months or $59.99 for a full year. (This does not include the cost of ingredients.)

Right now, partner stores include Walmart, Kroger, ALDI, Target, and Whole Foods, among others. With Kroger and Walmart, you can arrange to pick the ingredients up at the store, curbside. eMeals has also partnered with AmazonFresh and Instacart to provide delivery services.

According to one user, the menu plan you choose can affect which stores are available. For example, choosing the all-organic menu means you’ll probably have to buy from Whole Foods or other “health” stores—which usually means spending more money. I imagine your choice of stores is also affected by where you live; someone in San Francisco will probably have a lot more options than someone in Newark, Ohio.

Unlike a meal kit, with eMeals, the cost of ingredients isn’t baked into the overall subscription. For a second I though that rendered a service like eMeals pointless. Then I considered how much trial and error often goes into recipe planning. Unless you’re cooking the same rotation of dishes every single week, you’re probably going to wind up buying things at the grocery store you don’t use. Something like eMeals could save a lot of money on unused ingredients, depending on what you cook.

In his recent 2018 predictions, my colleague Michael Wolf noted that the recipe has become more, not less, important in this age of meal kits and 24/7 delivery services: It’s our “automated shopping list, the instruction set for our appliances, and the content is becoming dynamic, atomized and personalized depending on our personal preference.”

Shoppable recipes are seeing a lot of action as of late. Allrecipes and AmazonFresh partnered last year, as did Kroger and Myxx. Whisk, meanwhile, just joined forces with Amazon to offer shoppable recipes from over 20 publishers.

What’s attractive about a service like eMeals is that it turns the concept of shoppable recipe into an entire plan for the week or month, rather than just offering a set of individual recipes. There’s a wide audience for that kind of service: busy parents, caregivers, those managing significant food restrictions, and lazy, uncreative cooks like yours truly. All we need now is for the service to get integrated with a guided cooking program. Which will probably happen at some point in the very near future.

KptnCook Hopes Curation will Help its Shoppable Recipes Stand Out

As companies come to the realization that recipes are not just a list of instructions, but rather a discovery and commerce platform, the competition to become your recipe provider of choice is heating up.

Services like Innit and SideChef are using recipes as a platform and integrating with appliances to become the “GPS” of your kitchen. Startups like Chefling are matching what food you have with recipes and shopping lists to fill in any gaps. Amazon is jumping into the shoppable recipe space with partnerships with Fexy Media and AllRecipes. While other apps like BigOven get rolled up in a defensive play against the potential Amazon juggernaut.

Which brings us to a small Berlin-based startup with a funny name. 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.

KptnCook has partnered with major retailers in Germany to get a general sense of the products they inventory. They can send you to a store knowing that it carries Bisquick, but there’s no guarantee that Bisquick will still be in stock when you arrive.

This may sound inconvenient to our give-it-to-me-now American ears, but Hoefer says that German cities have a high-density of stores, so there is usually one close by and getting to it is not an inconvenience. Additionally, only 1 percent of Germans buy groceries online, and most online grocery delivery services in Germany are still next-day, according to Hoefer.

The more interesting way KptnCook is going against the grain is through curation. Where lots of recipe apps today will offer thousands of recipes, KptnCook only delivers three recipe options to your phone per day. That’s it. Each of these three recipes only takes a half hour to make. This limitation may seem counterintuitive, but when you constantly offer people access to any recipe, option paralysis can sink in. Limiting a user’s options can free up decision making.

Hoefer wouldn’t reveal how many users KptnCook has, but claims that their app has higher retention and click through rates than comparable food apps.

The company generates money now by basically creating branded content. It could, for example, potentially work with a brand like Kikkoman’s, incorporate that soy sauce into a recipe and drive people to a nearby store to buy it among the other ingredients. KptnCook can also potentially work with retailers to push people to particular stores. Retailers can make use of an additional mobile channel, and KptnCook sends people to the store to buy a cart full of items, not just one or two.

KptnCook has ten employees, has received some angel funding, and has been through both the Plug and Play and TechStars accelerator programs. While the app is available in the U.S., the company is primarily focused on the German market right now.

If KptnCook wants to make a more concerted effort to enter the U.S. market, it certainly faces an uphill battle. The market is becoming increasingly competitive as companies big and small compete in the recipe platform space. Having said that, what I like about KptnCook is the curation aspect. It’s easy to get stuck on stupid when scrolling through a bunch of recipes and having a trusted source do some decision making for me is a welcome feature.

Aisle Ahead Buys BigOven to Assemble Shoppable Recipes

VIC LLC., announced today that it has purchased recipe app BigOven, and rebranded as Aisle Ahead. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the purchase helps Aisle Ahead become a player in the soon-to-be hotly competitive shoppable recipe space.

If you’ve been reading The Spoon over the past few months, you’ve seen shoppable recipes become a hot topic of coverage. Recipes are no longer inert pieces of inspiration. Combined with same day delivery, recipes are becoming actionable discovery and commerce platforms.

See a delicious recipe for lasagna but don’t have all the ingredients? No problem! Click a button in the recipe and have what you need delivered to your doorstep in time to make dinner.

Founded in 2004, BigOven has 350,000 recipes in its database and the app has been downloaded 13 million times with more than 3.3 million registered members. BigOven also offers meal planning, shopping lists and an API to plug into outside services.

Aisle Ahead is an “end-to-end digital commerce platform that connects millions of shoppers with grocers.” With the addition of BigOven, Aisle Ahead can now enable shoppable recipes that consumers can order and get fulfilled from participating grocery stores.

The acquisition is a move to counter Amazon, which was called out by name in the BigOven press announcement with Aisle Ahead CEO, Steve Siopsis saying “The combination allows us to deliver ideal solutions for any grocer wishing to compete effectively, after hearing the wakeup call from Amazon and Whole Foods.”

The Aisle Ahead announcement comes on the heels of Myxx partnering up with Kroger for shoppabale recipes. You can bet there will be more announcements like these as smaller players roll up to try carve out their own space against the likes of Amazon and Instacart.

Amazon has already set itself up to dominate the shoppable recipe space with the acquisition of Whole Foods, partnerships with Fexy Media and AllRecipes, and integration of Alexa into smart refrigerators and other appliances.

Allrecipes Embeds AmazonFresh Shopping Directly Into Recipes

Today Allrecipes announced they have embedded AmazonFresh shopping capability into their top recipes.

The new integration allows home cooks to purchase ingredients from within the recipe and have them delivered same day via AmazonFresh. The “buy this recipe now” button can be seen in the screenshot of the Allrecipes app below:

Allrecipes recipe with a “buy this recipe now” button

To pull this off, AmazonFresh created a custom API that allows Allrecipes to access the online grocer’s ASIN number database. ASINs are alphanumeric 10 digit code Amazon assigns each product it sells. For each recipe, Allrecipes maps a list of suggested ingredients by ASIN utilizing Allrecipes Groceryserver technology and send that list back to AmazonFresh to create a customized, recipe-specific landing page.

Allrecipes has offered shoppable recipes through its Groceryserver technology – which it acquired in 2015 – for over three years. However, the partnership with AmazonFresh marks the first time the recipe publisher has integrated with an e-commerce provider for direct home delivery.

For Amazon, this continues a trend of the company pushing deeper into the consumer buying decision by embedding themselves directly in the recipe. Last week another publisher, food media company Fexy, announced they had integrated Amazon Prime Now into the recipes of their publications such as SeriousEats. The deal with Allrecipes now allows Amazon customers to access customized recipe driven ingredient delivery from the e-commerce company’s home grocery delivery service.

Meal Kits Go Custom

The push into the recipe by Amazon isn’t surprising since the company first showed signs it was investigating the idea in 2011 when it filed for a patent for shoppable recipes. The patent was awarded to the company in 2015.

By embedding itself directly into recipes, Amazon is, in essence, offering consumers the ability to create customized meal kits on demand. The idea of real-time meal kit creation is probably a frightening one for Blue Apron and other meal kit companies who rely on a model where the consumer must pick from a limited number of predefined meal kits a week or so in advance. Through this partnership and same day delivery, Amazon is allowing consumers to create meal kits around their recipes rather than telling the consumer what recipe they should make.

Solution For ‘Center Of The Store’ Problem?

For Allrecipes, the deal gives potential food brand partners strong incentive to work with the company since the recipe site can now directly influence what goes into a consumer’s shopping basket on AmazonFresh. For example, if a consumer is making chocolate chip cookies, the AmazonFresh landing page may have Gold Medal Flour and Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chips specifically because those brands have done deals with Allrecipes. While the consumer will be given the option to edit their shopping list, chances are most consumers will go with the prescribed suggestions.

For big food brands, the idea of direct integration into e-commerce purchase flow sounds pretty good given their difficult climate. The struggles of brands who live at the “center of the store” have been a widely discussed topic in recent years, and 2017 has been particularly difficult. With e-commerce expected to drive the majority of the growth going forward, CPG companies likely see their future growth dependent on deals like this.