When you live in a four-story walkup in New York City with a kitchen the size of a phone booth—and the nearest grocery options are the Trader Joe’s where the checkout line inevitably extends out to the sidewalk, the Whole Foods that’s clogged with visitors from the outer boroughs, and the overpriced and understocked bodega on the corner—it’s perfectly acceptable to eat English muffins or order takeout for dinner every night.
At least, that’s how I justify it.
But lately, I’m running out of excuses, as tech companies start taking on the highly lucrative grocery market. There are meal-kit companies like Blue Apron and Plated, which will send me weekly recipes, complete with perfectly portioned ingredients, in refrigerated boxes. There’s Instacart, which will let me order groceries from nearby stores. Amazon’s same-day grocery delivery service, Amazon Fresh, will soon be sharing the New York City streets with Google’s Shopping Express and the grandfather of the grocery delivery world, FreshDirect.
Now, another New York City-based startup is joining the fray, with a service that could not only benefit lazy consumers (myself, included), but could also become a powerful marketing tool for consumer packaged goods companies. It’s called Chicory, and it allows any recipe site to slap a “Get Ingredients” button at the bottom of the recipe. When users click the button, they can get all the ingredients they need for a given recipe delivered to them from one of Chicory’s online grocery partners.
The Chicory team, from left: Joey Petracca, COO; Yuni Sameshima, CEO; Adam Donahue, CTO Chicory
I could always choose a different brand if I wanted to, but Chicory is betting that I won’t.
All that is clever enough, but what could make Chicory an important force in the marketing world is the way it’s reinventing the idea of digital shelf space. In the offline world, brands spend millions of dollars on so-called “slotting fees” to secure prime real estate on store shelves. With its Get Ingredients button, Chicory has developed the online equivalent.
Brands can pay Chicory to guarantee that their products will be the first ones suggested to users for certain ingredients. For instance, if Kraft bought the rights to, say, cheddar cheese, and I click the Get Ingredients button for a macaroni and cheese recipe, then Kraft cheese would get automatically uploaded to my shopping cart. I could always choose a different brand if I wanted to, but Chicory is betting that I won’t.
Point-of-Sale Marketing Reborn
It’s covert point-of-sale marketing at its finest, and yet, Chicory CEO Yuni Sameshima says he and his co-founder Joey Petracca never really planned on turning Chicory into a marketing tool.
At first, they were focused purely on the consumer side of the equation. They knew that the grocery delivery market was booming and that recipe sites are some of the most highly trafficked pages on the web. If Chicory could connect these recipe-hunting consumers to online grocers, the startup would be able to collect a percentage of sales.
“Our vision was to help those users be able to get the ingredients then and there on the page itself,” Sameshima says.
It wasn’t until he and Petracca entered the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator that the team’s mentors suggested charging brands. “They said this is cool from a consumer perspective, but it could potentially be huge for brands who are looking to target certain consumers online,” Sameshima remembers. Now, Sameshima says he expects these fees to be a critical part of Chicory’s business model.
A Bigger Footprint
Chicory is still very much a fledgling startup, and Sameshima would only say that the team is “in talks” with a number of brands about fees. But the consumer side of the business has taken off since the Get Ingredients button launched in August. Through a partnership with the online grocer Peapod, the service is now live in 4,000 zip codes in the New York area. And while Chicory launched with a network of food bloggers, it recently struck deals with top recipe sites DailyMeal.com and MyRecipes.com, which will greatly increase Chicory’s footprint.
Sameshima is hoping this expansion among consumers will not only attract brands, but also online grocers, including major players like Google and Amazon. With more grocers on board, it’s not hard to see how Chicory could become a sort of price comparison engine for consumers, showcasing not only brands, but also the delivery services that offer the best deals.
“We’re really interested in the growth of online grocery and how that’s stirring up competitive forces. I think we’ll see delivery times decreasing, delivery minimums decreasing, and the quality increasing,” he says. “I think that’s where things can get interesting down the line.”
Home Page Photo: Andreas Kollmorgen / Flickr
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