A platform that allows social media scrollers to easily shop the ingredients needed to recreate influencer posted recipes has launched.
Cartd enables consumers to shop the groceries “directly from the native social media channel through to their supermarket of choice” in “three clicks”.
The platform translates recipe videos into the featured constituent ingredients to create pre-built shopping baskets on its website. Users then click through to purchase the required products on their supermarket website of choice.
“Every week, millions of new exciting recipes get posted on social media. These engage and inspire, often getting saved or shared with the intention of cooking them…never to be made,” said Cartd co-founder and CEO Watson Gardiner.
“Imagine, you’re sitting on the train and see a great recipe from Mob Kitchen or Plant Bois,” he added. “If you’re inspired in that moment, you should be able to buy it straight away. The fulfilment capabilities are there, but the seamless checkout functionality isn’t.”
Cartd aims to help content creators earn a commission from the ingredient sales their recipes generate. “By creating the infrastructure that connects social media to grocery checkouts, Cartd aims to plug the gap on attribution. So, for creators – if you create 2024’s viral recipe, you could be sat on a goldmine,” Gardiner, a former global partnerships lead at DoorDash, explained.
The platform – which Gardiner co-founded with Ben Hawkins, who has worked in digital product innovation at Waitrose – also features a machine learning engine that analyses the amounts of ingredients a user will have left over, and serves them with complementary recipes “to optimise spend and minimise food waste”. This AI-powered recommendation engine was “the crown jewel” and a “first globally” Gardiner said.
Cartd hopes to integrate with all of the UK’s major supermarkets, and map creator recipes directly to their corresponding products to allow users to select their preferred range and retailer when shopping recipes. For more niche ingredients, the company said it had “something coming down the pipeline” to give shoppers access to these products, direct from brands.
“Supermarkets are already working with individual creators on a pay-to-play basis, commissioning one-off recipes which stock their product lines. This gives consumers access to select recipes for a finite period of time, but to truly connect to the creator economy, requires constant and widespread partnership, which is not their core business as retailers,” Gardiner told The Grocer.
“We’re really excited about working with supermarkets to help them engage with digitally native consumers, right when they’re inspired. Cartd can supercharge supermarkets’ access to the creator economy on an evergreen basis, allowing consumers to checkout the latest viral recipe directly on their website, whilst removing the burden of managing creator or agency partnerships directly. Ultimately, consumers should be the ones who choose what’s on the menu, not retailers.”
Cartd has secured pre-seed funding from early-stage VC fund Antler, where the co-founders met. The company’s “big hairy audacious goal” was to make every recipe on social media shoppable without any food waste, it said.
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