There are a bunch of services out there that send you everything you need to make a home-cooked meal, from easy to understand recipes to perfectly measured ingredients, and they’re great. The reason they’re not more popular, however, is that a lot people find it hard to justify paying for these services when they can just look recipes up online and buy their own ingredients, which means they miss out on the luxury of having everything delivered. It’s understandable, but why compromise when you can have the best of both worlds? That’s the idea behind the new partnership between AllRecipes and Instacart, two of the biggest names in the food startup scene. Now all you need to do is find a recipe on AllRecipes, click a button to add all the ingredients to your online cart, and then Instacart will pick up the ingredients and deliver them to you.
Services that deliver the ingredients and recipes you need to make fresh, home-cooked meals, like Blue Apron, HelloFresh, and Plated, have grown in popularity as people are turning away from low-cost, fast food in favor of healthier alternatives. But those subscription services are still something of a luxury for many, thanks to their higher prices for the added convenience of measured ingredients sent to your home, versus simply doing the grocery shopping and meal planning for yourself. Today, grocery delivery service Instacart is offering a different option that could see it competing with these home cooking services – it’s announcing an integration with top recipe site AllRecipes, which will allow users to click a button to fill their cart with all the necessary ingredients. Instacart was already integrated into Yummly, the latter which recently raised $15 million and is now valued at $100 million for its recipe recommendation service reaching 10 million registered users. But the AllRecipes.com integration could prove to have an even bigger impact, however, as AllRecipes.com is one of the largest social networks devoted to food and recipes, seeing 1.3 billion visits per year from home cooks. The platform, owned by Meredith Corporation, also includes 19 websites and 3 mobile apps reaching 24 countries and 13 languages which gives it a large footprint that goes well beyond the markets Instacart currently serves.
