This 'TikTok' for foodies combines cooking and e-commerce
Hungry for yet another food app? Borrowing inspiration from TikTok, and backed by celebrity chefs Eric Ripert, of Le Bernardin fame, and Tom Colicchio, co-founder of Gramercy Tavern in New York City, flavrs aims to be a foodies' one-stop-shop for all things culinary.
Unlike other popular food apps such as Food Network Kitchen, NYT Cooking, Tasty and Kitchen Stories, flavrs kicks it up a notch by letting customers instantly shop for a recipe's ingredients directly on the app. "It's an all-in-one dedicated ecosystem where you can easily watch, shop and eat any recipe that catches your eye," Alejandro Oropeza, the app's co-founder and CEO, told ABC News.
A food app for "people who live to eat," flavrs is the brainchild of two "techies" with a passion for food. Oropeza, the former head of YouTube's creator marketing, and former Google engineer François Chu used their tech acumen to build the first shoppable-video platform for cooks.
Serving up thousands of cooking videos and tutorials on everything from saffron risotto to dairy-free chocolate crème brûlée, the app includes recipes and meal planning tools, while allowing users to buy ingredients through a custom integration with Instacart.
The platform, which looks almost identical to TikTok, is currently available in the App Store as a beta version. Oropeza said a larger rollout is planned in the coming weeks.
"I love that the recipes use simple ingredients that can be found easily -- and of course, it is very unique to be able to have the ingredients delivered right to your door from the same app as the recipe content," Ripert, a content creator for the company, told ABC News.
While the app is launching just ahead of Thanksgiving, one of the biggest food holidays of the year, Oropeza said he's not concerned with rolling out the platform during a time of high food inflation. "Eating at home is one of the best ways to save money, so bringing together inspiration (i.e. new recipe videos) and action (i.e. shopping) is in itself a great way to help people cook more at home -- and enjoy it," he said.
The platform has so far raised $7 million in seed funding with support from celebrity chefs including Ripert, as well as venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Wellington Access Ventures. In addition to well-established chefs, the platform has also partnered with popular social media content creators such as YouTube's Andrew "Babish" Rea, Davon Moseley from Royale Eats and Jamie Milne from Everything Delish.
"Think about this as a Spotify playlist for food," Oropeza said, "where you're going to start to aggregate the French collection, the Mexican collection, the Thanksgiving collection."
In an effort to "build a sense of community," Oropeza said users will soon be able to see what fellow users and content creators are cooking and bookmarking and then share those "playlists" with family and friends.
The app also uses algorithms to take the guesswork out of going from maple cranberry chicken for two to dinner for six. "The ability to scale recipes on flavrs is something that also excited me," Colicchio, who is also an investor in the app, told ABC News. "You don't have to worry about over-buying ingredients and trying to figure out how to make an eight person recipe work for two."
The challenge, of course, is how to make the app profitable in a crowded field. flavrs currently makes money by driving users to in-app partners like Instacart. For now, the app is entirely free, but in the future, Oropeza envisions offering users a paid-subscription option for premium content.
That "premium" content may be the ability to engage directly with content creators. Do you have a burning need to know which knives chefs like Ripert use at home? Not only will he answer your question, but you'll be able to instantly buy his knives of choice through the app.
"Every single piece of the technology has been built with the needs of foodies in mind, and since food is the ultimate universal human experience, we're very excited about the potential that lies ahead," Oropeza said.
This article was updated to correct Ripert's role with flavrs. He is a content creator for the company, not an investor.
