Recipes are just a click away at Kroger

The Kroger Co. is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and Twitter to help customers avoid food waste.

Kroger is rolling out the first generation of Chefbot, an AI-powered Twitter recipe tool that analyzes photographs to recognize nearly 2,000 ingredients and unlock 20,000 Kroger recipes for consumers to cook. To use Chefbot, consumers first snap a photo of three ingredients from their refrigerator or pantry. They then tweet their photo to @KrogerChefbot.

Through AI, Chefbot identifies ingredients and then scans thousands of unique recipes on Kroger.com. Within seconds, Chefbot responds to the user's original tweet to deliver a list of personalized recipe recommendations based on the selected ingredients.

Chefbot is not the first grocery app to assist customers with recipes. Retailers including Kroger partner 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. However, Chefbot is a proprietary Kroger tool which does not directly promote shopping.

"Last year, we launched Kroger's ‘Fresh for Everyone’ brand transformation campaign to underscore our commitment and belief that everyone should have access to fresh, affordable and delicious food," said Mandy Rassi, Kroger VP of marketing. "Chefbot is one of the ways we're delivering on that brand promise by making it even easier for our customers to achieve their meal aspirations, especially as the majority of shoppers are eating meals prepared at home multiple times a day during the pandemic."

"Never has it been more necessary for people to be able to find quick, sustainable, and easy solutions for making meals at home - and no place makes it easier for food brands to engage directly with these people than Twitter," said Dennis Bree, Twitter director of Catalyst + government & causes. "Through the use of innovative technology, Kroger is bringing meal-time inspiration to the people on Twitter who are actively tweeting about the need for new recipes more than ever before."