How food retailers can leverage shoppable recipes and digital meal planning services

More than ever, consumers discover their next meal idea online – whether through food blogs, influencer content, social media, or videos. This digital recipe and food product discovery isn’t just a media trend; it’s become a new point of sale.

Food retailers are now connecting the dots between content and commerce, embedding technology that lets customers add entire ingredient lists from recipes directly into their digital shopping carts or turning groceries into meal suggestions.

One solution recently making headlines is Food Influencers United (FIU). The scale-up launched its “One-Click-to-Cart” technology in Germany in June 2025, after a successful rollout in the Netherlands. FIU’s system allows users to transfer all recipe ingredients to an online supermarket basket with a single click. The service links online recipes with food delivery services via an order button. Selected products can be added to the shopping cart in seconds and ordered directly from the online supermarket. Already, brands such as Rewe, Knorr, and Kraft Heinz have joined the rollout.

With recipe pages driving billions of page views annually in Germany alone, this integration of recipe content with e-commerce functionality is closing the gap between inspiration and transaction. Whether featured on influencer platforms or brand-owned channels, “shoppable recipes” are enabling a seamless customer journey – and ideally generating measurable sales.

Chicory, a U.S.-based platform, is another example. Its technology is already embedded across thousands of publisher sites and supports more than 70 retailer integrations. Consumers viewing recipes can select their preferred grocery store – like Walmart, Albertsons, Kroger – or the delivery service Instacart, and send all needed ingredients straight to checkout.

Albertsons’ direct integration with Chicory since 2023 illustrates how retailers can turn recipe content into a seamless shopping experience. By integrating shoppable technology directly into recipes, retailers and brands reach consumers in the right mindset – at the moment they’re thinking about food and meal planning. Albertsons hopes to meet customers at the moment of inspiration and simplify their path to purchase. This hyper-contextual approach increases willingness to purchase, drives higher conversion rates, and may lead to larger baskets by promoting complementary product combinations rather than single items.

In Europe, cartd focuses on enabling frictionless transitions from food content on social media to online grocery checkout. One of their goals is reducing food waste. By optimizing ingredient lists across multiple recipes and reducing over-purchasing, cartd addresses both convenience and sustainability. Recommendations are enhanced using AI to deliver dynamic, personalized recipes based on users’ leftover ingredients, dietary preferences, and pantry stock. The goal is to support smarter meal planning while actively reducing household food waste.

There is more than one direction for integrating recipes and grocery carts. The cart-to-recipe approach reverses the funnel and proposes meals based on a user’s actual grocery purchases, adding value after or during the transaction and promoting smart meal planning.

Solutions like the Portions Master app represent this trend. Users scan or input their purchased items, and the app generates meal suggestions aligned with their dietary goals, portion needs, and cooking skills. Features include barcode and photo scanning, AI-driven recipe suggestions, and food freshness tracking – making it an adaptive assistant that evolves with the shopper.

This is another opportunity for retailers and grocers to offer value-added services to their customers: Swedish grocer Coop, in collaboration with Northfork, implemented a smart recipe recommender that analyzes cart content to propose relevant meal ideas. This improves the user experience and is also intended to increase the value of the shopping cart.