Tinder For Turkey? No, Really

There are some places one expects to see digital innovation and some places one doesn’t.

Today, our national day of Thanksgiving in the U.S., is not typically one of those places.

Which is not to say there is no tech on Turkey Day — far from it.

Americans who grow weary of arguing about the forthcoming U.S. Presidential elections with their relatives over dinner will not flee to the stores this year (even if they want to, since many of them won’t be doing the Thanksgiving open this year), they will instead find a place to be alone with their smartphone and the wonderfully calming world of commerce.

Need a recipe? How much time do you have, because “there’s an app for that” doesn’t begin to cover it.

This year, various American consumers used apps that offered them a plethora of Thanksgiving recipes from every American historical period. And each year it just gets better. Instead of just an app to find a recipe, now consumers can find a recipe, get the history of the dish, the calories in each serving (so that with their smartwatches, they can run or walk the corresponding number of steps to burn off those calories) and build a virtual shopping list that has all of the ingredients delivered to their homes in an hour.

And there’s even an app to just deliver the whole dinner, completely cooked and piping hot to their dinner table.

But even those who give thanks for being able to slave over a hot stove to prepare their family’s feast can also be thankful for tech this year, particularly those with smart appliances in their kitchens.

Sure, a regular oven can cook a turkey, but a smart oven will gather real-time data about the turkey as it cooks and make subtle changes in the process so that it comes out golden brown and perfect every time. Plus, it will live tweet the roasting and Instagram the progress as it goes along.

OK, not really that last one — yet.

The point nonetheless is that Thanksgiving from the outside looks like the quintessentially traditional American holiday whose celebration is largely unaltered from the representation of it Norman Rockwell created in 1942.

Which might, by extension, leave one inclined to decide that turkey farmers were not the sorts of people who thought much about technologically innovating their product. But that, says Craig Thompson, owner of New Hampshire’s Mayfair Farm, is not fair.

“So when I tell people about what I do, I talk about teasing cows, ordering feed and how the new app’s beta test is going this year,” Thompson said. “No one has ever asked me why I tease the cows.”

If anyone ever did, he wouldn’t say anyway — he writes it off as his “secret method” — but he does find it odd that most people think that the idea of an organic livestock farm with a mobile app is somehow a stranger concept to most people than a grown man working actively to annoy his livestock.

And the eyebrows only raise higher when Thompson explains that the app, which will include a variety of eCommerce functions when it is launched to the public, was created when he and his business partner/wife realized something that he believes that they were possibly the only two people on earth in a position to uncover.

“The world needs Tinder for Turkeys, which is not what we said at the time. But as we were talking about preparing for the Thanksgiving rush, we realized that we had a large group of consumers who essentially wanted to really get to know their product before putting it on the table.”

The problem, he said, is that while being a free range and organic meats producer is not exactly a low-energy job on a good day, during the national epidemic of turkey-enthusiasm each year, life on the farm gets hectic.

“Consumers — particularly those who are very concerned about their food’s origin — have actually been burned a bunch of times in the last few years, and they now want to actually know that the turkey that some of them are driving two hours up from Boston to get is actually free range, and actually enjoys a pretty nice life before being their dinner.”

It’s not that customers want to “date” their food (Thompson bristled at that suggestion) so much as consumers are increasingly inclined to want to think about their food instead of just taking it for granted to appear on the table ready a la the Norman Rockwell painting.

And so the app is designed around letting them do that, with streaming “Turkey TV” that shows the turkey’s well-being, as well as content and material that illustrates how the turkeys actually live on the farm.

“As a society, we are learning that there are consequences for how we eat and what we eat — for us and for the planet,” Thompson said. “I think if food producers can use mobile to educate consumers about where the food they eat comes from and how exactly it gets to their table, that’s a great thing. You can pay very little and eat a very sad turkey. Or you can pay a little more and eat a happy turkey.”

Of course, it is hard to imagine to that there are many turkeys that are happy to eaten, but we can imagine if that’s how it is going to end up no matter what, life on the Mayfair Farm is much more pleasant than life in an industrial farm.

And, Thompson noted, their small scale beta test this year indicates that it is something customers actually enjoy — and one that many report actually increases their thankfulness.

“I think it is true that no one wants to see the sausage being made, but I also think it is true there are a lot more people than we think who do want to know something about how it is made — and who makes it.”