Whisk, the U.K. startup that has built a B2B data platform to power various food apps, including making online recipes “shoppable,” has acquired Avocando, a competitor based in Germany.
The exact financial terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although TechCrunch understands it was all-cash and that Whisk is acquiring the tech, customer base, integrations and team. Related to this, Avocando’s founders are joining Whisk.
“The team is joining Whisk to help scale a joint global vision to help leading businesses create integrated and meaningful digital food experiences using cutting-edge technology,” says Whisk in a statement.
To that end, Whisk’s “smart food platform” enables app developers, publishers and online supermarkets/grocery stores to do a number of interesting things.
The first relates to making recipes shoppable, i.e. making it incredibly easy to order the ingredients needed to cook a recipe listed online or in an app. Specifically, Whisk’s platform parses ingredients in a recipe, and matches it to products at local grocery stores based on user preferences (e.g. “50g of butter, cubed” matched to “250g Tesco Salted Butter”). It then interfaces with the store to fill the user’s basket with the needed items.
The second is recipe personalization. Based on user preferences (e.g. disliked ingredients, diet, previous behavior, deals at a favorite store and trending recipes based on location), Whisk is able to create personalized recipe feeds, search results and meal plans.
The third aspect is an Internet-of-Things play. This is seeing Whisk’s data power experiences that connect IoT devices with different parts of a user’s journey. Think: smart fridges connected to recipes.
“As the e-commerce grocery market quickly accelerates across Europe, players are increasingly looking for ways to connect recipe content to grocery retailers and provide consumers with personalized nutrition, planning and purchase options right from the comfort of their kitchen,” says the startup.
Whisk says its platform powers experiences for more than 100,000,000 monthly users through the applications of its clients. They include retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Instacart and Tesco, which use Whisk to enable online grocery shopping via recipes. On the IoT front, Samsung is using Whisk to build smart food applications that take user preferences, what’s in their fridge, what offers are in the supermarket, and recommends recipes. Other customers include publishers, such as the BBC, and food brands like McCormick, Nestle, Unilever and General Mills.
Meanwhile, Whisk says it is currently focused on the U.S., U.K. and Australia, and with today’s acquisition will expand services across Europe. “Together, Germany, France and Spain represent a larger e-commerce grocery market than both the U.S. and U.K. individually, with the largest online recipe usage per capita figures in the world,” adds the company.
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