Recipe apps seem to be rife, enabling people to share and learn new recipes. I’m wondering whether there’s still room for recipe apps to stand out and differentiate, both from a value proposition and a product perspective. It’s with this in mind that I’m keen to look at Whisk and learn more about it’s (iOS) app:
My quick summary of Whisk before using it? — I expect a standard recipe sharing app, include both recipes curated by Whisk and recipes shared between peers.
How does Whisk explain itself in the first minute? — Whisk’s welcome screen tells me that I can save all my recipes to a recipe inbox and ‘build, smart collaborative shopping list’. The inclusion of the word ‘smart’ there suggests to me that there’s a strong machine learning component to Whisk. When I swipe across, I learn that I can have the items in my app-generated shopping delivered through Whisk.
Getting started with Whisk — Once I’ve signed into the Whisk app via Google, I can start creating a shopping list in the app. Curious to see what happens when I press the plus call to action on the screen below and what my shopping list will look like. How can I best use the sorting function at the top right hand side of the screen?
Once I’ve pressed the plus icon, I land on a screen which shows me ‘favorites’, enabling me to save my favourite items to quickly build (future) lists. As a starting point, I can choose from five ‘popular’ items, which I can keep expanding in groups of five at a time.
I then select a number of popular items and expect the app to now generate a shopping list for me, with relevant products:
I now realise that all I’ve done up till this point is editing my favourite items, which I shop for on a regular basis, instead of creating a ready-to-go shopping list:
When I click on the individual items, the items get checked and I think that means I’ve got these items and therefore don’t need to be added to my shopping list. Sorting by ‘Aisle’ or ‘Recipe’ doesn’t seem to make a difference here.
Clicking on the shopping cart icon, triggers Whisk’s shopping cart integration. First, I need to select from the shops available in my region:
Having figured out how to create a shopping list in Whisk and buying these items directly through Whisk, I’m keen to learn more about the recipe saving feature of the app. Saving online recipes top the app is very easy and intuitive, mainly because it’s exactly the same as adding things to the likes of Pinterest and Instagram.
I guess that this is where Whisk’s ‘smartness’ comes into play, both in terms of ingesting a recipe and its individual ingredients and converting this understanding into an automatically generated shopping list. I press the “Add to list” call to action on the recipe in Whisk:
Did deliver Whisk deliver on my initial expectations? — Yes. Exceeded them in fact. Didn’t feel the most intuitive at times, but Whisk does feel like much more than just a standard recipe app!
Related links for further learning:
- https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/17/whisks-a-i-powered-recipe-app-lets-you-send-the-ingredients-to-your-door
- https://whisk.com/
- https://www.grocerydive.com/news/walmart-instacart-partner-whisk-launches-multi-platform-app/569192/
- https://thespoon.tech/whisk-launches-consumer-facing-app-that-makes-any-recipe-shoppable/
