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Allrecipes heats up personalized food feeds, social sharing on app

Meredith Corporation?s Allrecipes digital hub is revamping its mobile application with a bevy of new cooking-friendly features, including a personalized food feed displaying trending meal inspiration, profiles for home cooks and easier recipe sharing on Facebook.

The recipe destination has updated its Dinner Spinner iOS app in a bid to help consumers streamline their grocery shopping and meal creation experiences. Allrecipes? redesigned app makes it simpler for mobile users to create profiles showcasing their kitchen success stories, organize favorite recipes by occasion or theme and share their cooking triumphs with friends via Facebook.

?With the new version of the Allrecipes Dinner Spinner app, we are most excited about the introduction of Cooks? Profiles, which give cooks the ability to better meet their needs ? as well an opportunity to serve the needs of other cooks with shared interests ? through a personalized place where they create, save and curate content into their own themed collections,? said Esmee Williams, vice president of consumer and brand strategy at Allrecipes.

?The Internet is exploding with food content today across all channels and site types, and having a single place where they can to break through the noise to quickly access information that meets their immediate foods needs or furthers their passions is a huge win,? she said.

?The Cooks? Profiles can be shared with and followed by other cooks, which further unlocks the possibilities and power of Allrecipes' community of 50 million cooks.?

A side of mobile
The food-focused social network is ramping up to help more cooking enthusiasts find and make their dream meals at home or on-the-go by giving them access to its collection of peer-created profiles, hyper-local grocery store offers, step-by-step tutorials, photos and recipes.

The redesigned Dinner Spinner app, which is free to download, features a new personalized food feed that highlights daily trending, seasonal and recommended meal inspirations. The feed becomes further customized to a user?s preferences and tastes as the individual saves, shares and makes specific dishes.

The tool also becomes smarter as it detects the activities of the brands and cooks whom the user follows.

Consumers who enjoy showing off their latest kitchen successes can set up a cook?s profile within the new app. The profile will share their recent concoctions with followers, and enable them to see which meals their friends have recently created or shared with their networks.

Meanwhile, the Custom Collections feature allows individuals to organize their favorite recipes by occasion or theme, such as Fourth of July barbecue, kid-friendly camping snacks and paleo diet dishes. This makes it simpler for consumers to revisit a recipe that previously caught their eye.

The revamped Dinner Spinner app is currently available for iOS devices, with Android capability set to roll out later this summer.

A mix of old favorites
The Dinner Spinner app still houses some of users? favorite features from previous iterations, including the slot machine-inspired recipe finder, touch-screen recognition and search filters.

Additionally, individuals will be able to leverage the app?s bright-screen functionality, which keeps content alight while users are cooking or shopping. Smart shopping lists, step-by-step video tutorials and hyper-local supermarket offers are also included.

One of the other new functionalities that cooking fans may find useful is the addition of the ?I Made It? button. Consumers who have made and enjoyed a certain recipe can share the concoction with their friends by tapping the button to send it via Facebook.

The upgraded recipe sharing feature also enables individuals to text favorite recipes to friends.

The Dinner Spinner app currently maintains a fan base of 18 million people, highlighting how cooking and mobile can come together to provide seamless kitchen and shopping experiences.

Per Allrecipes, seven out of 10 adults access food-related content online each month, with three-fourths of that audience leveraging their smartphones in-store to help with grocery shopping decisions.

This significant shift in customer behavior has prompted the brand to roll out more mobile-friendly platforms and partnerships.

?In May, 74 percent of our 90 million total monthly U.S. visits occurred on mobile devices; among millennial females, 86 percent of monthly visits were on a mobile device,? Ms. Williams said. ?Mobile is our fastest area of growth, up 53 percent year-over-year.

?Social is a key component of the app experience,? she said. ?Our app community is more engaged when accessing Allrecipes as compared to the mobile Web. This is because as a group, they tend to be more passionate about the brand and our community since they have explicitly taken the time to download our app to their personal device.

?The second reason is because the app provides a superior experience when cooking (the screen stays illuminated) ? and it?s immediately following the cooking process when cooks are most likely to take photographs of their dishes, write reviews or post updates to Facebook.?

An Allrecipes executive at eTail West 2016 divulged how the digital food hub markets to its strong force of mobile users and millennial consumers by leveraging geo-targeted advertisements and creating an authentic image (see story).

Additionally, Allrecipes joined forces with Instacart last fall to enable cooking enthusiasts to shop for ingredients for their favorite meals on mobile and have products delivered from local grocery stores to their homes in as little as one hour (see story).

?At Allrecipes, it?s critical that we?re always innovating to deliver new ways to enhance our consumer and advertiser mobile brand experience because mobile is now the predominant device among home cooks accessing digital food content and tools,? Ms. Williams said. ?On Allrecipes, 72 percent of our visits occur on mobile devices.

?This shift will become even more dramatic in the years ahead because younger generations are so mobile minded,? she said. ?As a brand, if you aren?t on mobile, you simply aren?t going to be part of this audience?s consideration set when making cooking and purchase decisions.?