Birmingham, UK -- Since launching in 2013 Whisk has grown fast -- the company have almost half a million monthly active users, their ecommerce platform is integrated across 300,000 third-party recipes and receives more than 40m monthly recipe impressions, and Whisk’s shopping list is integrated with six major online grocery retailers in the UK, Australia and the US.
Today, Whisk is launching an entirely new look for the platform on Whisk.com and on the iPhone app store.
Along with a redesigned site, Whisk has added a features to allow home chefs to create their own digital cookbooks. Recipes from any site, anywhere in the world can be saved and accessed from one central place, accessible at Whisk.com or on a free iOS mobile app.
Nick Holzherr, CEO and Founder of Whisk explains, “Users love saving recipe content with Whisk and we decided to “double down” and make personalised cookbooks a central focus at Whisk. Long term I believe we can add incredible value to people’s lives by leveraging the gigantic sets of unique data that we process about favourite recipes, what’s being purchased at grocery stores, and ultimately how users are interacting with recipes and store items. Lowered cost and eased accessibility of open and free Artificial Intelligence tools like Google’s TensorFlow are now making it possible for us to leverage data to make personalized recommendations”.
To explore these next evolutions in how people buy and make food, and in particular technology’s impact on this behavior, a good analogy might be to look at the way technology has impacted the world of music. In a pre-Internet world, people discovered new music from trusted friends and family, hearing songs on the radio or reading magazine articles. Then, with the advent of streaming services like Pandora and Spotify, people could suddenly receive personalized suggestions about music they might enjoy based on what they’ve been listening to.
Whisk uses Machine Learning, an area of AI, to analyse hundreds of thousands of recipes and link them to their Food Genome™. They are then able to examine the flavor profile of dishes, nutritional value, relationships between ingredients, and how food is cooked.
“This gives Whisk the ability to make smart recipe suggestions based upon an individual’s palette, taking into consideration allergies and dietary preferences, waste food reduction options, the best deals in stores and really whatever a person enjoys eating. Artificial intelligence is approximating human reasoning more and more closely all the time. Imagine having your own personal nutritionist and chef that knows and cares about what you like to eat. We think that over time we’ll be able to make that type of personalized experience possible for everyone.
“The advantage for AI in the food space is that recipe content is usually very structured from the starting point -- there’s a title, picture, set of ingredients and set of steps for almost any recipe. Our challenge lies in deepening that understanding of content and making sense of how different parts impact what someone wants. Like most applications of Artificial Intelligence, we’re at the start of what’s possible. The future looks tasty.”
Get your free personalized recipe recommendations from Whisk in seconds. Simply sign up at www.whisk.com.