Grocers Leverage Shoppable Recipes to Seize on Food-at-Home Shift

With inflation-sensitive consumers cutting restaurant spending, grocers are jumping on the opportunity with contextual commerce.

Yuni Sameshima, CEO and co-founder of contextual commerce tech provider Chicory, which makes recipe content shoppable, discussed the benefit that consumers’ shift to eating at home has had for grocers in an interview with PYMNTS.

“In the past year, we’ve seen a nearly 20% increase in what we add to carts — people adding products to their basket through our network,” Sameshima said. “And we’ve seen increased traffic on recipe sites towards the end of the year this year. So, we definitely have seen that shift [to home cooking].”

Indeed, research from PYMNTS’ study “Consumer Inflation Sentiment: Inflation Slowly Ebbs, but Consumer Outlook Remains Gloomy,” which drew from a survey of more than 2,100 consumers, found that 78% have been eating at home more often to save money amid inflation.

Moreover, the share of consumers making grocery purchases is on the rise. Research from PYMNTS’ study “New Reality Check: The Paycheck-to-Paycheck Report: 2022 Year in Review Edition,” created in collaboration with LendingClub, found that in the 30 days prior to being surveyed, 93% of those who live paycheck to paycheck with issues paying bills made a grocery purchase. Ninety percent of those who live paycheck to paycheck without issues paying bills and 85% of those who do not live paycheck to paycheck did the same.

This share marks a significant increase from earlier in the year. PYMNTS’ August study, “Digital Economy Payments: Consumers Buy Into Food Bargains,” found that 83% of consumers reported purchasing grocery products in the past 30 days.

As companies have been turning their focus from long-term growth to near-term results amid ongoing economic challenges, Chicory has found that to make its contextual commerce integrations as effective as possible, it is best to keep them simple.

“In the past, we’ve created new products based off of a lot of data and machine learning, trying to figure out the right algorithms to reach the right people,” Sameshima said. “But ultimately, when things get difficult or inflation hits or recession is coming, the products that have worked well for us have been the ones with the most simple premise.”

He noted that shoppable integrations on recipes that call for specific ingredients and/or brands have been consistently effective over time, and consequently that has been where the company has kept its focus.

Looking to the years ahead, Sameshima predicted that the rise of in-store technologies will bring the digital and physical shopping experiences closer together, enabling data-informed initiatives across commerce channels.

He noted that innovations such as cashierless checkout offer the possibility to gather data around consumer behavior, inventory tracking and more, arguing that this technology can be profitable and scalable, offering it more staying power than other flashy digital initiatives.

“I think that [grocers] are going to have to rethink their business models and those moonshot ideas,” Sameshima said. “Capital isn’t as cheap as it used to be. Retailers are going to go back to, ‘How can I take these eCommerce learnings and advancements and integrate those with retail and in-store?’ I think, overall, retail is just going to become more and more of a holistic experience for the consumer as well.”