Kroger expands interactive recipe services
The Kroger Co. is participating in the Whisk smart food platform in its latest effort to let customers shop via recipe ingredient.
Purchased by Samsung Next in 2019, Whisk, enables consumers to save recipes and make them instantly shoppable across integrated online grocery retailers, or take an optimized list to buy in-store. Whisk also works via personal voice assistants such as Samsung Bixby, as well as with Samsung smart appliances.
In addition to Kroger, Whisk’s integrated partners include Walmart, Amazon Fresh, and Ahold Delhaize, as well as the Instacart on-demand delivery service. Other digital recipe services offered by Kroger include Chefbot, a proprietary, AI-powered Twitter recipe tool that analyzes photographs to recognize nearly 2,000 ingredients and unlock 20,000 Kroger recipes for consumers to cook. The grocer also partners with Innit Personalized Shoppable Recipes, which allows customers to create a customizable meal kit consisting of ingredients based on their dietary preferences, and shoppable recipe app Cooklist.
As a result of this latest shoppable recipe integration, Kroger customers can turn any recipe from Whisk’s network of publishers, brands and apps into a smart shopping list and instantly purchase for pickup or delivery from any Kroger store banner. The experience is supported by the artificial intelligence (AI)-based Whisk's Food Genome, which helps ensure that a recipe's ingredients are matched with the correct and currently available products at each Kroger store. Kroger will be offered as a purchase option for every one of the 500-plus million monthly recipe interactions on the Whisk platform.
“Kroger is always innovating to help make our customers’ lives easier and influence the path to purchase,” said Jody Kalmbach, Kroger’s group vice president of product experience. “The Whisk partnership is a new part of our seamless experience to help meet our customers’ evolving needs, especially as more households are cooking at home and searching online for recipe inspiration. Whisk supports a frictionless customer experience through premium integration and precise product matching, which is key as we continue to expand our digital ecosystem and adapt to our customers’ changing shopping styles.”
“As more retailers strengthen their e-commerce strategy to adapt to changing consumer preferences and expectations, we’re excited to grow the Whisk ecosystem and bring Kroger, the largest grocer in the U.S., to all the users on our existing recipe and hardware integrations,” said Nick Holzherr, head of Whisk. “Users in 35 states can now access fresh and affordable Kroger groceries conveniently from the buttons we power on published recipes from any app or website.”