Kroger’s Home Chef Partners With Delish as Grocers Monetize Recipe Content

As grocers seek ways to monetize consumers’ enthusiasm for digital culinary content, Home Chef is partnering with Delish to create meal kits based on the popular food media brand’s recipes.

The Kroger-owned meal kit company on Monday (Dec. 18) announced the collaboration, which runs for 12 weeks and spans 12 popular recipes from the culinary brand.

“We’re delighted to partner with Delish to offer a menu of achievable recipes that home cooks can have fun making for themselves and their loved ones,” Eric Miller, partner and influencer director at Home Chef, said in a statement.

Delish has an extensive following, with more than 3 million Instagram followers and more than 1 million on YouTube, with significant follower counts on other social media. The grocer’s move to monetize consumer enthusiasm for this content through meal kit recipes comes as brands have found that driving sales directly through social media can prove challenging.

In fact, the study “Tracking the Digital Payments Takeover: Monetizing Social Media Edition,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and Amazon Web Services collaboration that draws from a survey of nearly 3,000 U.S. consumers, reveals that, while 43% browse social media to find goods and services, only 14% had purchased a product through any social media platform.

Across the industry, grocers are looking for ways to capitalize on consumers’ enthusiasm for culinary content with shoppable integrations. For instance, Albertsons has partnered with contextual commerce provider Chicory on embedding purchasing opportunities into recipes. Plus last year, online grocery platform Instacart debuted its Shoppable Recipes offering, a suite of product integrations that allow food creators to make their recipes shoppable on TikTok, Tasty and Hearst Magazines (including Delish).

Walmart, the world’s largest grocer, has been a leader in the contextual commerce space, creating original content in addition to its shoppable recipe efforts, including interactive web activities with shoppable moments embedded every step of the way, and Albertsons similarly has made forays into original shoppable content.

“Recipe content has always been incredibly shoppable. What’s happening is, we now have the pipes all connected so that you can go very directly from content like recipes into transactional moments,” Jason Young, then president of Chicory, told PYMNTS in an 2021 interview. “But if you look at recipes historically, they’ve always been a point of inspiration, a point of kicking off the food shopping process.”

Kroger, for its part, seems to be increasingly looking for new ways to get consumers engaged with its eCommerce offerings, partnering with players in other industries to expand its audience. For instance, on Wednesday (Dec. 13), GE Appliances announced a collaboration with the grocer, whereby certain smart ovens’ LCD screens display recipes from Kroger and select consumer-packaged goods (CPG) brands, enabling consumers to purchase ingredients directly from the device.

An increasing share of consumers are shopping for groceries digitally. The report “Consumer Interest in an Everyday App,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and PayPal collaboration that draws on responses from more than 2,200 U.S. consumers, reveals that 61% of those who had shopped for groceries in the previous month did so via connected devices at least some of the time.