Albertsons, Pinterest to make recipes shoppable
Albertsons is tapping into Pinterest’s product discovery features to enable shopping by ingredient and recipe.
The grocery conglomerate is entering a new multi-year agreement with Pinterest to enable its customers to discover and shop food items via the visually-oriented social platform. Features of the partnership will include a meal-planning API, designed to make recipes seamlessly shoppable by integrating saved pins straight into the Albertsons banner app. Shoppers will be able to add all of the ingredients to their cart in one click, and the integration will also recommend what consumers should make based on searches, saves, and purchase history.
Albertsons has also turned 20 associates into Pinterest creators, including a master meat griller, a certified sommelier, a patisserie expert, and a mom who has mastered meal prepping. Associates will leverage their store’s "fresh" food inventory and Pinterest search trends with the Idea Pins format.
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In addition, Albertsons and Pinterest will create interactive, shoppable “tablescapes” that show shoppers how a single ingredient can be leveraged for multiple recipes and/or able to meet specific dietary restrictions. According to data from Pinterest, 93% of food and beverage weekly Pinterest users use the platform to discover products in their path to purchase.
Increasingly, grocery retailers are attempting to turn the process of planning meals into a targeted omnichannel shopping opportunity. For example, Walmart recently began collaborating with multi-platform media company Meredith Corp. to offer online grocery customers artificial intelligence (AI)-based services such as meal planning, shoppable recipes, visual search, and chatbots.
As a result, Walmart now has the ability to match millions of products with consumers in real-time at scale. Through these new shoppable ad experiences, customers can meal plan and add recipe ingredients directly to their Walmart online grocery cart for in-store pickup or home delivery.
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“At 4 p.m. every day, the number one food search on Pinterest is what’s for dinner, and Albertsons is delivering with inspiring and intuitive experiences that help our Pinners answer that question every day,” said Pinterest chief revenue officer Jon Kaplan. “Albertson’s forward-looking use of Pinterest only solidifies the critical role that online grocery inspiration will continue to play in the consumer journey. We’re thrilled to see how the team is creating quality content through multiple channels, from our API and AI innovations, to our burgeoning creator ecosystem.”
“Solving the age-old question of ‘what’s for dinner?’ is something that we’ve been determined to simplify for our customers,” said Chris Rupp, executive vice president/ chief customer and digital officer at Albertsons. “We want to meet them where they are while making the experience easy and enjoyable, and our partnership with Pinterest is just one more way Albertsons is creatively looking to continue our connections with customers as a food authority.”
This story originally appeared on Chain Store Age.