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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Tasty One Top

BuzzFeed’s Tasty Expands E-Commerce Capabilities with Walmart Agreement

BuzzFeed’s cooking site, Tasty, along with Walmart and Jet.com announced a partnership today that allows consumers to purchase equipment necessary for making certain recipes directly from the Tasty app. The move continues the trend of vertical integration we’ve seen elsewhere in the food world, and sets up BuzzFeed to expand its e-commerce ambitions.

Starting today, Tasty recipes will include direct links to Walmart/Jet.com to buy the tools needed for that dish. Right now, users can only buy hardware items such as a slow cooker, or skillet or measuring cups. The company says it plans to include the purchase of groceries “beginning next year.”

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For Walmart, the partnership gives the retailer access to the enormously popular Tasty base, which has generated more than 65 billion video views and has more than 90 million followers on Facebook. Tasty has already shown that it can move units. As The Spoon’s Mike Wolf wrote last month:

“Last year, the company worked with Oster to run a sponsored cooking video that included the Oster grill. Within a day, the Oster grill had completely sold out on Amazon, despite the fact the cooking video didn’t have a link to the Oster grill Amazon page.”

Recipes are becoming more than a set of instructions, they are becoming more direct commerce vehicles. AllRecipes launched shoppable recipe lists through AmazonFresh earlier this year. And as same day delivery companies like Instacart expand, recipes are no longer constrained by what people have in the kitchen. With instant gratification increasingly available, inspiring recipes can inspire people to pay for the tools and ingredients immediately.

But this also sets the stage for BuzzFeed to expand it’s own hardware ambitions. As the company missed revenue targets, it is expanding its Product Labs, which created the Tasty One Top induction cooking device. From a memo BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti sent out to employees:

“Finally, we are expanding our Product Labs business, which exceeded our expectations in its first full year of operations, into BuzzFeed Commerce which has a strong lineup of new licensing and commerce partnerships, and new products for 2018. BuzzFeed Commerce will work closely with our new BuzzFeed Media Brands team to create new opportunities for our brands in the way it has with Tasty.”

Partnering with Walmart lets BuzzFeed use Tasty as a way to convert the eyeballs of its massive audience into consumers who buy the $149 One Top, or whatever BuzzFeed-branded cooking implement the company wants to create.

BuzzFeed has proven adept at navigating rapidly changing technology trends and fickle attention spans. This deal with Walmart is another great example of the company’s nimbleness by expanding the utility of Tasty in a way that is organic to the experience and potentially adding to the bottom line.

BSH Acquires Controlling Interest in Kitchen Stories As Part Of ‘Connected Cooking’ Strategy

Late last month, BSH Home Appliances, the largest appliance manufacturer in Europe, announced it had acquired a controlling interest in Kitchen Stories, maker of video-rich cooking apps with step-by-step instructions and recipes.

The deal is yet another sign of how large appliance makers are moving quickly to transform themselves into content companies and connect their appliances to digital content platforms.

In the announcement, the two companies said they had plans to integrate Kitchen Stories content into BSH’s smart home connectivity app and platform, Home Connect. While initial integration will start with basic tasks like temperature setting for Bosch and Siemens appliances, more capabilities like guided cooking will be built into the app over time.

Kitchen Stories cofounder Verena Hubertz outlined the vision around integration with the Home Connect platforms:

“This investment will enable us to tap the connected kitchen market, and to help design the cooking of the future. We’ll develop solutions to help users in all aspects of the cooking process – from inspirations for recipes to added-value services. And we’ll be combining our own findings with those of BSH about what consumers want. That will enable us to reflect users’ expectations better, and to make Kitchen Stories even more attractive. Kitchen Stories will also soon be integrated into the Home Connect ecosystem, and will gradually be expanded with new applications.”

This deal is the latest in a string of moves by appliance companies to more deeply integrate their cooking hardware with cooking content as the kitchen becomes increasingly digital. Earlier this year Whirlpool acquired Yummly as the kitchen entered what Whirlpool exec Brett Dibkey described as a ‘transformation.’ A new crop of startups like Hestan Cue, ChefSteps, SideChef, and Innit have been busily creating a variety of products that create immersive guided cooking offerings that connect with cookware and appliances, and this summer the media startup Buzzfeed moved into guided cooking with the launch of its Tasty One Top.

The deal caps what has been a few years of fast growth for Kitchen Stories, an early entrant into the video-guided cooking app space alongside others like SideChef. According to the company, the Kitchen Stories app now has millions of users and has been released in 150 countries worldwide.

Another interesting aspect of the deal is it marks a successful exit for a women-led company.  Like many other tech segments, women have been under-represented in the smart kitchen, so hopefully the move is a sign of increasing momentum and encouragement for women-led startups in the space.

Lastly, the deal comes just over a month before CES, where big tech companies like Bosch often show off their latest products. I would expect to see the company at least showcasing Kitchen Stories early integration in Las Vegas.

You can see an interview with the two Kitchen Stories cofounders Verena Hubertz and Mengting Gao and BSH Chairman Karsten Ottenberg below:

Ten Questions for BSH and Kitchen Stories

Is The Tasty One Top The Future Of Buzzfeed As It Scales Back Its Ad Business?

It appears Buzzfeed may have lost its buzz.

At the very least the fat content startup founded by media mad scientist Jonah Peretti has certainly had its share of bad news of late. First, there was word the company missed its revenue targets, and now the company is laying off 100 – or 6% – of its 1,700 person global workforce.

For many of us, it’s a surprise to hear about Buzzfeed’s struggles given Peretti’s nearly unbroken string of success over the past dozen years. As the creative genius behind the early days of Huffington Post, and later turning Buzzfeed into one of the fastest growing and influential digital media publishers of the past decade, it seemed for a long time that anything Peretti touched turned to gold.

But in today’s world where no publisher is spared the winds of change from platform monopolies like Facebook and Google, Buzzfeed has realized the limitations of late of having what is primarily an ad-supported business model.

In an internal memo to employees, Peretti outlined how Buzzfeed’s ad-driven business model has started to miss a cylinder or two:

“As our strategy evolves, we need to evolve our organization, too — particularly our Business team, which was built to support direct sold advertising but will need to bring in different, more diverse expertise to support these new lines of business.”

So what does a company that built a hugely popular website monetized primarily through advertising do when revenue growth starts to slow?

As it turns out, we may already have the answer.

Over the past year, the company has slowly rolled out a new line of physical products online. Tapping into the impressive success of its lifestyle publications like Tasty, Buzzfeed first started with a cookbook and more recently debuted its own cooking appliance in the Tasty One Top. And last month, the company recently rolled out its first card game, Social Sabotage.

And in his memo today to employees outlining changes, it looks like the company is doubling down on the early success of its products:

“Finally, we are expanding our Product Labs business, which exceeded our expectations in its first full year of operations, into BuzzFeed Commerce which has a strong lineup of new licensing and commerce partnerships, and new products for 2018. BuzzFeed Commerce will work closely with our new BuzzFeed Media Brands team to create new opportunities for our brands in the way it has with Tasty.”

While it’s too soon to say how many Tasty One Tops and card sets the company has sold, my guess is probably a lot. Last year, the company worked with Oster to run a sponsored cooking video that included the Oster grill. Within a day, the Oster grill had completely sold out on Amazon, despite the fact the cooking video didn’t have a link to the Oster grill Amazon page.

Now imagine what happens when the company starts featuring its own grill repeatedly in its cooking videos and asks its readers to buy it?

Perhaps it’s not all that surprising that Buzzfeed is trying to convert its community into paying customers. Companies like ChefSteps and Instant Pot have been able to build successful hardware businesses on a much smaller scale through tapping into their own enthusiastic communities, and with hundreds of millions of video viewers of its cooking videos every month, it seems like it would be a huge missed opportunity if Buzzfeed didn’t try.

So, will sales of cooktops, card games and who-knows-what-else rejuvenate growth for company that rose to prominence with listicles, weird quizzes and publishing the occasional spy dossier?

Maybe, maybe not. But either way, I am certainly excited to see them try.

You can watch my conversation from the Smart Kitchen Summit with Talia Halperin, GM of Tasty Commerce and Claire King, head of Culinary for Tasty below:

CONTENT AS COOKING FUEL: THE STORY OF TASTY’S ONE TOP from The Spoon on Vimeo.

The Tasty One Top And The Rise Of Content Powered Cooking

Back in 2008, Techcrunch founder Michael Arrington wrote a manifesto in which he announced plans to build a low-cost tablet computing device.

While the idea of a technology blog beating computing giants like Apple and Microsoft to market with a tablet seemed preposterous at the time, Arrington continued to pursue his crazy dream. Before long a team had been assembled, prototypes built, and eventually the Crunchpad got pretty darn close to becoming a reality before everything fell apart and instead we got something called the JooJoo.

The Crunchpad

The story of the Crunchpad seemed so improbable in part because of the difficulty of Arrington’s day job. When I went to work for one of Techcrunch’s biggest competitors (Gigaom) during this time, it made me even more fascinated with the story since I saw first hand just how hard it is to run a company tracking the fast-moving world of technology. The idea of actually building the technology in addition to writing about it seemed insane.

I also think part of what made the idea of the team behind a tech blog creating a piece of computing equipment so hard for me and others to wrap our minds around is most of us still view people – and companies – through a Richard Scarry lens on the world. In other words, content companies make content, hardware makers make hardware; food companies make food and so on. Sure, there are weird conglomerate mashups like when GE owned NBC, but often these types of weird combos were the result of merger and acquisition sprees in the 80s.

But if there’s anything we’ve learned from watching companies like Amazon or Google, the old rules don’t seem to apply anymore.  These companies have taught us that once you build a competency in one thing – whether e-commerce or transportation – that strength can often be leveraged to build a competency in an adjacent (or often non-adjacent) space.

Amazon started with books, eventually moved into web services, then to hardware, and now they’re on to grocery stores. Google started with search, moved onto mobile, then IoT and now all sorts of crazy ideas whether its VR, healthcare or balloon-based broadband.

And so while I was surprised when I learned last week Buzzfeed had launched its hardware device called the Tasty One Top, I also instantly knew this made sense at some level. We are, after all, living in the “throw the rules out” era of Amazon. And yes, the story of Crunchpad showed us that that occasionally a content company can break the Richard Scarry mold.

People – and companies – don’t live in a Richard Scarry world anymore.

But I also realized what I was witnessing with the Tasty One Top made sense because it was indicative of a trend I’ve been thinking about for some time, an idea that in the future cooking companies need to become content and community companies.  I’d witnessed it with the acquisition of Yummly by Whirlpool, and before that, I saw that ChefSteps had been building a large community around its content which it then leveraged into willing customer base for its cooking device called the Joule.

As I wrote when Whirlpool acquired Yummly, the deal “gives Whirlpool a massive infusion of cooking content and community. As newer companies in the connected kitchen like ChefSteps have shown, having strong recipe content and an associated community can create fertile soil upon which to launch new hardware products. With Yummly, Whirlpool now has a built-in community to tap into as it expands is smart kitchen product lineup in the coming years.”

I realized this is the same principle Buzzfeed was capitalizing on, the idea that they could tap into a large community built around compelling content to find a friendly and willing audience into which to tap.

But I also knew it was more than that. What the Tasty One Top further validated for me was the idea of content-powered cooking, where cooking content becomes more than just a dry recipe on a page or a simple YouTube video which we watch to learn a new skill. The idea of content powered cooking is central to guided cooking, something I first started writing about after I first saw the Hestan Cue. In short, guided cooking is where the cooking content not only acts as a helpful set of instructions for the cook but works with an app and sensor-powered appliance to become the guidance system for the entire cooking experience.

When I talked to Buzzfeed Labs’ Ben Kaufman last week about the One Top, he told me that they wanted to turn their Tasty cooking videos into a utility.  To do so, they went back and did the arduous work of breaking down each video into single steps, time-stamping and logging each, and then building an app that would work with the One Top itself.

The result is a content-powered cooking experience, where what began as quick viral cooking videos ultimately become part of the cooking system and experience itself.

Together, the idea of a large community built around content coupled with a cooking product and associated experience powered by the product makes lots of sense. In many ways it’s indicative of what companies like ChefSteps and Hestan Smart Cooking were already building, only coupled with the world’s largest cooking video site in Tasty.

Kaufman told me last week that this is the only cooking appliance Buzzfeed plans on making, in large part because they built the Tasty One Top as a Swiss army knife type of sorts that can work with nearly any type of recipe. But he also said they had more products ideas in mind in which they can build around the “utility” they’ve created in the Tasty cooking videos and app.

I can hardly wait to see what type of Richard Scarry busting concept they dream up next.

Want to hear about the future of connected cooking? Make sure to not to miss the Smart Kitchen Summit. Just use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets.