Myxx Creates Recipe For Healthy Dinners Through Shoppable Grocery Lists

Consumers want to provide healthy dinners for their families, but it can be difficult to find the time to plan home-cooked meals. Monica Wood, for example, had to travel for work and tried having her nanny make meal kits for her kids so they wouldn’t eat fast food.

Yet her kids didn’t like the meal kits; they ended up eating pizza and burgers anyway. And she still had to go to the grocery store for breakfast, lunch and snacks.

“It really wasn’t a solution for my busy life,” Wood said, adding that she talked to some tech-savvy friends, and they agreed. “We all came to the same conclusion that there wasn’t a technology solution that fit our lives … of how do I get dinner on the table and get my groceries really quickly?”

Beyond a consumer perspective, Wood saw a big shift on the horizon, as dollars once spent on in-store marketing would be invested in online platforms. That realization — along with her consumer perspective — served as the genesis behind Myxx, an online platform that offers curated recipes.

With more than 50,000 recipes connected to select retailers, consumers can choose a recipe and add all the items needed to make the dish to their shopping list, where brands can advertise their products.

CPG Brands

Myxx works with consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands that want to promote their products. When a consumer comes across a chicken recipe, a company that makes chicken could work with Myxx to be the first option for consumers to add to their shopping lists.

Consumers can complete the purchase when Myxx’s technology moves those items to a shopping cart at a participating retailer’s website for curbside pickup or delivery options. Otherwise, consumers can see the brand appear on an aisle-by-aisle shopping list that they can take on a trip to a brick-and-mortar grocery store.

In addition, CPG companies can have their own recipes on the platform, which could lead to better spent marketing dollars. CPG companies spend millions of dollars on sending users to static landing pages for recipes, Wood (the CEO and co-founder of Myxx) said, but those recipes themselves are not shoppable.

With Myxx, however, those CPG companies can have a microsite that allows consumers to buy a brand’s products directly from a recipe. To ensure their campaigns are gaining traction, brands can view their metrics — from the number of clicks on a recipe to the prices at the grocery stores that consumers see in their shopping lists.

Grocery Retailers

Kroger shoppers in 17 states can currently use the Myxx platform. The company plans to expand to the entire Kroger family of retailers in 2018. As of now, Myxx also includes more than 240 Harris Teeter stores in the Southeast. Myxx also worked with Harris Teeter, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Kroger, to launch a private-label site — HarrisTeeterRecipes.com — in 2017.

Kroger has been quietly leading a digital push. In 2015, Kroger launched 84.51° — its data analytics arm focused on creating better consumer engagement strategies. And, in October 2017, Kroger announced it would spend $9 billion over the next three years to modernize its grocery shopping experience, according to the PYMNTS Omni Usage Index.

Beyond Kroger, Myxx connects its users with other grocery retailers. But like Instacart, which doesn’t have formal relationships with every retailer on its platform, Wood doesn’t have partnerships with each grocery chain. Integration is easy, however, if retailers decide that they want to formally partner with Myxx, she said.

“The beautiful thing about Myxx is that we do not need any relationship to actually onboard a retailer to our platform,” Wood said. “Our technology is really turnkey, where we do all of the work before we actually sign a partnership with a retailer.”

Meeting Consumers’ Needs

Wood is also open to working with grocery delivery services like Deliv, Instacart and Shipt, as consumers get used to shopping for groceries online. According to some reports, the eCommerce grocery space could see consumer spending of $100 billion in five years. Wood wants to reach consumers however they choose to shop.

“We want to be a resource for our consumer to shop how, when and where they want and be a resource for retailers to provide added value to their consumers,” Wood said.

To be geographically relevant to consumers, Myxx has localized its website so it can detect a user’s location. So, if a consumer sees a friend from another part of the U.S. share a Myxx recipe on Facebook and clicks on the link, Myxx will connect him or her with a local grocer.

Move to Smart Devices

To grow its technology capabilities, Myxx plans to launch an Alexa skill and work with Google Assistant. Using those platforms, consumers would be able to find a recipe and add the required ingredients to their Myxx shopping list — all by voice command.

Beyond voice-activated assistants, Wood is keeping a close watch on connected kitchen devices, as appliance OEMs such as Samsung launch products like smart refrigerators. If she finds the right partners, the platform could come to connected kitchen appliances this year. 

Once consumers begin to put smart appliances in their homes, the Myxx platform would be “easily integrated” into those devices, she said. And once Wood’s platform is in the mix, perhaps a handwritten grocery shopping list will be a thing of the past smart appliance a task left for only the connected fridge and Myxx’s software.