America’s largest grocery retailer leverages Samsung Next food technology platform Whisk to power seamless digital shopping and e-commerce experiences for millions of customers
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Whisk, the Samsung Next food technology platform that takes inspiration from planning to plate, today announced the addition of The Kroger Co. to the Whisk Ecosystem. Consumers can now turn any recipe from Whisk’s network of publishers, brands, and apps into a smart shopping list and instantly purchase for pickup or delivery from Kroger Family of Stores. This seamless experience from recipe to shopping cart is powered by Whisk’s Food GenomeTM, which uses artificial intelligence to ensure that a recipe’s ingredients are matched with the correct and currently available products at each Kroger store. With Kroger as a purchase option on every one of the 500+ million monthly recipe interactions on the Whisk platform, the partnership will support the retailer’s seamless experience model.
The Whisk-Kroger partnership comes at a critical time for the millions of Americans who are shifting to online grocery delivery. With 40% of consumers cooking more at home in recent months1, the partnership will help millions of Kroger customers go from meal planning to grocery pickup or delivery to food on the table, more seamlessly. The integration between Whisk and Kroger reduces common customer friction points by leveraging a premium API to ensure accurate inventory and product matching.
“Kroger is always innovating to help make our customers’ lives easier and influence the path to purchase,” stated Jody Kalmbach, Kroger’s group vice president of product experience. “The Whisk partnership is a new part of our seamless experience to help meet our customers’ evolving needs, especially as more households are cooking at home and searching online for recipe inspiration. Whisk supports a frictionless customer experience through premium integration and precise product matching, which is key as we continue to expand our digital ecosystem and adapt to our customers’ changing shopping styles.”
The Kroger-Whisk partnership is just the latest addition to Whisk’s existing roster of grocery retailers, brands and food content providers in the U.S., UK, Australia and throughout Europe. Whisk’s unique Food Genome is the AI and Natural Language Processing technology that maps the world’s food ingredients, their relationships, their nutrition, perishability, flavor and availability and matches them to the ingredients listed in recipes from any platform and available at local grocery stores. With over 500 million recipe interactions each month, the Whisk Food Genome becomes more robust as the Whisk ecosystem grows, making it attractive to large grocers, food content publishers and grocers publishing food content, alike. Grocers are able to produce data-enriched food content as well as personalize future interactions, tailoring outreach and content to shopper preferences and needs.
“As more retailers strengthen their ecommerce strategy to adapt to changing consumer preferences and expectations, we’re excited to grow the Whisk ecosystem and bring Kroger, the largest grocer in the U.S., to all the users on our existing recipe and hardware integrations,” said Nick Holzherr, Head of Whisk. “Users in 35 states can now access fresh and affordable Kroger groceries conveniently from the buttons we power on published recipes from any app or website.”
Whisk, which was acquired by Samsung Next in 2019, also integrates with personal voice assistants like Samsung’s Bixby as well as with Samsung smart appliances.
For more information about Whisk, please visit www.Whisk.com/business
About Kroger:
The Kroger Co. employs nearly half a million associates and serves 11 million customers daily through a seamless shopping experience under a variety of banner names. To learn more, visit the company’s newsroom and investor relations site.
About Whisk
Whisk powers the creation, discovery, personalization and monetization of food content online, in-store and at home. Whisk partners with the world’s largest retailers, publishers, CPG brands and health companies to help them connect with their consumers and drive product purchases at every stage of their food journey – from inspiration and consideration to purchase and preparation. Whisk was founded in 2012 and was acquired by Samsung Next in March 2019. For more information, visit https://whisk.com/business/.
1tps://www.fmi.org/our-research/research-reports/u-s-grocery-shopper-trends
Contacts
Whisk Media Contact: Rhiannon Pacheco, rhiannon.pacheco@samsungnext.com
Kroger Media Contact: Kristal Howard, (513) 762-1304
