Consumers’ Mid-Inflation Shift to Home Cooking Creates Contextual Commerce Opportunities

As consumers seek budget-friendly alternatives to dining out, shoppable recipes are catching on, according to Chicory.

The contextual commerce platform, which announced last month the expansion of its partnership with publishing giant Hearst to offer all its ad solutions across 17 of the media company’s online publications, has noticed an uptick in engagement, which it attributed to both consumers’ long-term shift toward eGrocery and their more immediate increased preference for home cooking, as the company told PYMNTS.

“Familiarity with eCommerce and digital shopping and increased consumer willingness to make purchases or add items to cart from whatever content they’re looking at have definitely supported that increase,” Nick Minnick, vice president of strategic partnerships at Chicory, noted in an interview with PYMNTS. “But more short term, what we’re seeing is a lot of returning to cooking at home being driven by inflation.”

Minnick cited Chicory’s findings that 55% of consumers are increasing their home cooking amid inflation, noting that, as the contextual commerce platform sees it, grocery shoppers are making use of “a lot of the at-home food preparation skills” that they “developed during COVID.”

Indeed, PYMNTS research confirms that as food prices rise, consumers are seeking out less expensive options than restaurant dining. Research from the study “Consumer Inflation Sentiment: Inflation Slowly Ebbs, but Consumer Outlook Remains Gloomy,” for which we surveyed more than 2,100 consumers in August, found that 78% have been eating at home more often to save money amid inflation.

Since that survey, the pressures prompting this shift have only intensified, suggesting that likely more consumers have been making such changes. It was not until March that, for the first time in this inflationary period, restaurant price increases exceeded those of grocery, according to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers. Specifically, food at home prices rose 8.4%, and food away from home prices increased 8.8%.

“There’s an increased desire to cook at home for budgeting purposes,” Minnick said. “And with that, we’ve seen an increase in the engagement with our shoppable recipes, which we also think is indicative of shoppers … thinking a little bit more carefully about their grocery purchases and planning them out further in advance.

Plus, consumers’ interest in purchasing grocery products online is certainly increasing significantly. Findings from PYMNTS’ study “Changes in Grocery Shopping Habits and Perception,” which drew from a December survey of more than 2,400 U.S. consumers, revealed that 45% of consumers now shop for groceries online at least some of the time and 7% do so all the time.

On the publications’ side, Minnick noted that these shoppable integrations create ad sales opportunities, enabling the sites to sell the marketing opportunities that the recipes present to brands and retailers. Additionally, the company’s existing deployments provide insights into which kinds of recipes are the most effective at driving sales.

Overall, the trend is simplicity, with consumers increasingly seeking to spend less time in the kitchen, even when they are cooking at home.

“We’ve seen a lot of our publisher partners start to focus on simpler recipes, so recipes with fewer ingredients and more simple cooking methods as largely a way to promote time savings with their users [and to offer] more efficient, family-friendly recipes,” Minnick said. “We’ve seen an uptick in recipes that feature fewer ingredients being added to cart.”