The struggle is real in almost all households—the mad dash to get a healthy, appealing dinner on the table after a busy day of work, school and activities. To facilitate the daily routine and find fresh ideas for meals, home cooks increasingly turn to online recipes, but it’s all too easy to become quickly frustrated by the recipe “clutter” that can result from a search.
Trusted content helps shoppers avoid recipe misfires
With millions of recipes available online, there are many that are too complex or require unfamiliar ingredients, and even worse, have not been tested for the home cook. And even though the rise in food blogs has created an ever-expanding online vault of recipes, it’s difficult to know whether or not a knowledgeable, experienced cook is double-checking the directions or ingredients. The busy dinner hour is no time to discover that a well-intentioned blogger has inadvertently missed a step or mismeasured a critical ingredient.
That’s why many shoppers are increasingly turning to trusted sources for curated recipes that they know will deliver what they need. Online grocery shoppers, in particular, are planners—more than half check recipes and 44% plan out meals before shopping, finds research from the Food Marketing Institute. Additionally, nearly 40% of those online shoppers appreciate integrated tools, such as online recipes, meal-planning and nutrition information. Now with the added capabilities of shoppable recipes, finding the right recipes has never been more important.
But where do they find curated recipes? One option is a “shoppable platform,” like Relish, which offers shoppable recipes, customizable shopping lists, meal plans and intelligent scaling.
“A digital shoppable recipe platform like Relish offers home cooks the chance to find diverse options, with the assurance that the recipe itself has been scrutinized to ensure ingredient accuracy to avoid last-minute dining disasters,” says Cliff Sharples, co-founder of Fexy, the content-driven technology company that hosts Relish.
In a departure from the AI-served recipes so prevalent today—which use machine learning to quickly read hundreds of thousands of online recipe pages and map ingredients to products, regardless of the accuracy or recipe quality—Relish combines the best of AI with actual “human” intelligence.
In other words, on the Relish platform, recipe experts check for the many nuances of ingredient lists, which not only catches errors so they can be fixed before they go live but also feeds back into the heuristics that will ultimately make the AI smarter.
“Recipe quality is paramount on a shoppable recipe platform,” says Megan Rider, Domestic Marketing Director with the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. “We have had great success working with partners such as Relish as we have been able to execute a shared vision from a quality, aesthetic and precision standpoint.”
Brand-specific recipes offer convenience at the point of purchase
More and more, brands are realizing the vast opportunity in the online shopping world to align their products on the digital grocery shelf with the best, most relevant recipes. Shoppers are often already overwhelmed by the plethora of choices online and tend to appreciate the suggestion of exactly which type of seafood or pasta to add to their cart. And, with over 50% of millennials self-identifying as “foodies,” having a set of recipe collections from the best bloggers, recipe developers and publishers that have been enabled with great planning and shopping functionality found in platforms like Relish create a winning combination for brands.
"That’s why the industry is embracing shoppable recipes as a way to merchandise ingredients by building specialty retail experiences, and ultimately generating substantially more shoppers for their e-commerce initiatives," says Sharples. “Curating the best recipes from trusted sources becomes a key success factor,” he says. “With shoppable recipes, online grocery items appear in the context of exactly what that shopper is considering eating later that day.”
“A trusted online recipe space is analogous with your favorite cookbook full of dog-eared pages,” says Rider. “Whether you go online to seek out an innovative and eclectic recipe, or to find your tried-and-true standby, you want to be assured that the results will be splendid and satisfying. In a sea of recipe platforms, it is wonderful to have a trusted source for high-quality, visually appealing recipes.”
Wondering how your brand can shine amidst our curated collection of recipes that reach shoppers right at decision time? Contact Relish today.