This is a Media & Entertainment innovation from The 70 Best Trend-Driven Innovations of 2019.
London-based recipe platform ckbk officially launched out of its beta version this month. The company partnered up with publishers and established culinary figures (such as Yotam Ottolenghi and Nigella Lawson) to offer an expertly curated library of best-selling recipes as well as entire cookbooks; currently, 350 cookbooks and 80,000 recipes are available to peruse. Touting itself as the ‘Spotify for recipes’, ckbk also offers personalized recipe recommendations based on preferences. A monthly subscription is GBP 8.99 per month.
The trends harnessed by ckbk can serve as a guide for the next innovation your brand cooks up! Here’s how:
Step 1: Bake in some passive curation. For many sectors, active curation (where the customers does the work of shaping something to fit their needs) is already a thing of the past. In calling itself the ‘Spotify for recipes’, ckbk clearly acknowledges consumers’ expectations for passive curation have been heightented over the last few years by services like Spotify. There is TOO MUCH music out there to choose from. Listeners have swapped the exhausting hunt for new tunes for playlists that are automatically created by the company’s all-knowing algorithm, zero user effort required (see this deep dive on Discover Weekly from back in 2015). The overload of options online applies to more than just music and recipes! Which mountain would your customers love your brand to sift through, on their behalf?
Step 2: Make it better, add an editor. Consumers see technology getting smarter every day. Recently an AI seized headlines for maybe being smarter than an eighth grader. Users trust algorithms to find (and get better at finding) the ‘best’ for them… to a point. They also put a tremendous amount of trust in experts and tastemakers like Ottolenghi; trust that has put his cookbooks on bestseller lists and sent this writer on many a wild goose chase looking for the obscure ingredients his incredible recipes call for! Hence ckbk harnessing this trusted expert and others to curate its recipes. Can your brand combine machine-fueled smarts with the experience of your industry’s (human) thought leaders to better serve your customers?
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