SOLUTION DEEPDIVE

The Ultimate Guide To Building A Successful Online Recipe Platform For Online Retailers

January 28, 2025
Unlocking the Power of Recipes: 7 Building Blocks For Your Recipe Platform’s Success

Many online grocery retailers struggle to leverage recipes effectively as a tool to boost sales and increase customer lifetime value (LTV). Yet, global success stories showcase the untapped potential of this strategy. Shoppable recipes can account for 5% to 8% of online sales for grocers, according to Jordan Berke, founder and CEO of Tomorrow Retail Consulting and a former Walmart executive. Recipes, when integrated seamlessly into a retailer’s ecosystem, can drive significant engagement, foster loyalty, and create new revenue streams.

“Shoppable recipes can account for 5% to 8% of online sales for grocers” 

Have you attempted to build a recipe hub but found it falling short of expectations? While this endeavor requires time and thoughtful execution, doing it right can unlock a tremendous competitive advantage. A well-executed recipe hub not only supports customer retention but also positions your brand as a culinary ally, creating a base of hyper-loyal shoppers.

The Opportunity in Recipe Hubs

A robust recipe hub offers transformative benefits:

  • Grow Basket Size: Inspire shoppers to purchase complementary ingredients for complete meals.
  • Increase LTV and Brand Loyalty: Encourage habit-building through saved favorites and repeat purchases.
  • Monetize Ad Space: Create new opportunities for retail media partnerships with food brands and advertisers.

However, success is contingent upon incorporating all seven essential elements. Let’s break them down.

The 7 Building Blocks of a Successful Recipe Platform

The 7 building blocks to online recipe platform success

1. Build Your Product Foundation

A scalable, intuitive technology platform is the backbone of your recipe hub. This includes seamless integrations with your existing web and app platform. Whether you need widgets, APIs, or a full reverse proxy integration, every integration method will be fully customized to seamlessly align with your brand's website design and identity. Read more about SideChef’s Recipe Tech Solutions here.

Equally critical is a deep integration with your product catalog, inventory management systems, and e-commerce infrastructure. A robust tech foundation enables recipe shoppability with accurate product availability and allows you to give personalized suggestions based on your customer’s shopping habits. 

SideChef's Recipe Recommendation Widget shows meal ideas within a retailer's product page

At the basis, start with a dedicated section on your website for browsing recipes. This foundational setup should include an editorially curated homepage feed, an advanced search engine, and features that allow users to save recipes and add all the ingredients for a recipe to their grocery cart with a single click.

For instance, incorporate a recipe recommendation widget on product pages to highlight creative ways to use individual items. Imagine this: you’re viewing a banana product page. Bananas aren’t just a simple snack—they can transform breakfast pancakes or even serve as a surprising base for a vegan curry dinner. By inspiring customers with creative meal ideas and encouraging them to try new recipes, you motivate them to purchase additional ingredients, increase their total basket size by up to 25%, and cook more at home.

2. Develop Your Unique Content Strategy

In the highly competitive world of online recipes, capturing your customer’s attention is no small feat. Today’s consumers expect recipes to be both visually appealing and engaging. High-quality, step-by-step images—or even better, carefully curated video content—are no longer optional; they’re essential. To stand out, craft a content strategy that aligns closely with your target audience’s preferences, ensuring every recipe resonates and keeps them coming back for more. Find your recipe style, and deliver with excellence in quality and consistency in brand look and feel.

Having a consistent image style with high-quality recipes is essential to building a loyal user base

How many recipes do we need for our platform to be successful? We often hear this question from clients, and there’s unfortunately no single truthful answer to this. It depends. Are you targeting a niche audience, or do you aim to serve a diverse customer base, with different lifestyles, cuisines and food preferences? Are you aiming to provide dinner recipes only, or a mix of all meal types? You can start with as few as 500 dinner recipes, to bring enough variety to a homepage feed and enough content to have users come back for more. SideChef has over 20,000 recipes in its library, all tagged with our advanced tagging system, of which many can be licensed to you. Our recipe and audience insights can help inform your content strategy, to create content that works.

To manage your growing library of recipes effectively, a modern CMS is essential. It enables you to organize, update, and refresh recipe content effortlessly, keeping your platform dynamic and engaging. Choosing the right CMS, however, is often underestimated and can be pivotal to your platform's success.

SideChef's Recipe Management Tool allows you to fully control your own recipe content

A great CMS goes beyond merely storing recipe titles, images, and instructions. For example, consider an automated ingredient system, like SideChef’s Recipe CMS, which includes up to 5,000 ingredients. This system matches ingredients to your product inventory, facilitates search filtering, and powers recipe personalization.

Complexities such as recipe quantities and unit systems also need careful handling, particularly if your platform spans multiple regions. Unit conversions should be seamless to ensure an intuitive user experience. Have you thought about enabling users to adjust the serving size and automatically see ingredient quantities update in both the grocery list and recipe instructions? A proper setup for your ingredient unit and quantity system will allow all that!

Recipe tagging is another critical feature. It forms the backbone of a robust search experience, enabling homepage filtering based on seasonality, trends, or themes. Proper tagging also supports tailored recipe recommendations, ensuring users find the perfect recipe every time. Superbowl coming soon? Easily create a home row featuring all recipes tagged as ‘superbowl’, or expand the results to show any recipes tagged as ‘snacks’, ‘game night’ and under 30 minutes’.  

3. Prepare Your Growth Plan (with 6 growth hacks!)

With the right recipe tech and content in place, your platform will just take off and grow on its own, right? We've seen this assumption countless times in the industry, and unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Building a loyal and expanding user base is where long-term success is made, and it’s what separates the true winners from those hoping for a quick fix.Outline clear, goals for your recipe hub, including KPIs like basket size growth, click-through rates, and repeat purchases. Recognize that success takes time, so set realistic milestones to stay on track and manage internal stakeholders’ expectations. The last thing you want is for your project to be shut down before it has a chance to fully develop. Develop a plan to attract traffic, retain users, and continuously expand your audience. 

Applying growth hack to your recipe platform will grow your user base

At SideChef, our 10 years of experience in the industry have led us to uncover 6 key growth strategies that can drive success for your platform. While we typically keep our "secret sauces" under wraps, we're temporarily sharing our guide on 6 Ultimate Recipe Platform Growth Hacks. Packed with insights on growing organically, leveraging your existing audience, and maximizing the impact of paid campaigns, these hacks are designed to inspire you and kickstart your platform’s growth!

4. Create That Buzz!

Now that you’ve established a strong platform, built a robust recipe library with high-quality content, and are driving significant traffic to your site—congratulations! The foundation is set. But how do you transform your static platform into an engaging, dynamic experience? It’s time to develop an editorial strategy, a community activation plan, or both!

Bring your recipe platform to life with editorial love and community features

Building an Editorial Plan

Start by crafting an editorial calendar to keep your content fresh and relevant. Highlight seasonal recipes, holiday meal ideas, and the latest food trends to maintain year-round interest. For inspiration, SideChef created a Full-Year Recipe Editorial Calendar, which outlines 40 key food occasions throughout the year and provides advice on aligning your content with these events. Leverage your CMS tools to manage this content effectively and ensure visitors keep coming back for more.

Activating Your Community

Building a community is no small feat, but it’s entirely achievable with the right approach. Communities often take time to grow, so don’t be discouraged if you don’t see immediate results. Start by identifying a small group of passionate users—your early advocates. Get to know them, understand their interests, and make them feel valued. These individuals are the initial spark that can ignite your community’s growth.

From there, develop a clear community strategy. Think about how users can interact on your platform. Can they share personal recipes or comment on others’? Should they have the ability to follow each other or participate in discussion threads? Consider your role as a community manager: will you simply moderate, or actively initiate discussions, host contests, and engage with your audience?

Lastly, explore opportunities to bring in guest contributors, such as writers and amateur chefs, to connect with your audience and keep the community vibrant and engaging. With careful planning and persistent effort, your platform can become a thriving hub for food enthusiasts everywhere.

5. Add In Loyalty Loops

When steps 1-4 are successfully implemented, you should begin to see steady growth in your platform’s engagement and Monthly Active Users (MAUs). However, halting here would be a missed opportunity, as the next three steps focus on optimizing your budget spend and getting even more value from your platform.

A key principle in behavioral science, the "Rule of 7," explains how consumers typically need to encounter a brand’s message at least seven times before taking action and making a purchase. Once you've attracted the right audience and engaged them with your recipes, it’s crucial to stay top of mind. Building new habits takes time, so to truly boost Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), be prepared to invest in retaining your customers.Carefully plan the loyalty loops you want to incorporate into your product and marketing strategy, ensuring that you're not only acquiring and engaging customers but also retaining them. These loyal customers—no matter how small your initial base—will become your brand advocates, offering valuable feedback, leaving reviews, and spreading the word within their communities. As your loyal user base grows, you may even find that you can reduce your paid campaign spend, as these advocates will help drive growth for you.

Loyalty Loops look at how you can retain your customer at every stage, and utilize loyal users to reach new users

Consider rewarding loyal customers with incentives tied to recipe hub engagement. For example, offer discounts on ingredients they frequently purchase for saved recipes or give them exclusive early access to premium content.

6. Personalize It! (with the help of AI)

In our new reality, where Gen-AI technologies have taken a huge leap, personalization is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. Recommend recipes through a Recipe Assistant plugin and proactively suggest recipes based on dietary preferences, purchase history, or local trends. Track their recipe views and saves, create look-alike audiences, and combine these insights with customer’s personal food profiles, which they complete during onboarding.

A fully personalized meal planner can even suggest an entire week of meals tailored specifically to each user, taking into account their family’s food preferences, cooking goals, nutritional needs, and budget, while optimizing ingredient usage to minimize food waste. Personalized experiences not only make customers feel valued but also increase the likelihood of them returning for more.

7. Iterate With Data and Real Insights

While it may seem obvious, the final building block for recipe success is often one of the most overlooked. How well do you truly understand how your customers engage with your recipes? Do you segment your users effectively? Are you aware of how much your online recipe shoppers contribute to both online and offline sales?

By leveraging analytics, you can monitor user behavior and optimize your recipe hub's performance—not in isolation, but as an integral part of your overall business. Understand what content resonates with your audience, and use these insights to refine your strategy, boosting both engagement and conversions.

How Can SideChef Help You?

Building a recipe hub is a multifaceted challenge, but you don’t have to go through it alone. SideChef is your all-in-one strategic partner for online recipe success. We provide the technology, content, and expertise to transform your recipe hub into a revenue-driving powerhouse.

Investments in your own recipe platform show results over time in sales uplift and user's LTV

With SideChef, you gain access to:

  • Scalable tech solutions tailored to your needs.
  • A rich library of curated recipes with full integration capabilities.
  • Strategic expertise to craft and execute a growth plan, including the ability to run nationwide paid campaigns designed to deliver high ROI.
  • Data-driven insights to inform your strategy and optimize performance.

Take the first step toward culinary commerce excellence today. Let SideChef help you turn your recipe hub into a competitive advantage that delights your customers and drives business success.