Chefbot is a first-of-its-kind AI tool that helps people make the most of the ingredients they already have by finding recipes which use those ingredients. For users, it’s as easy as snapping a photo of their ingredients, tweeting the photo to @KrogerChefbot on Twitter, and cooking one of the recipes Chefbot replies with. For Kroger, it meant teaching visual artificial intelligence to recognize over 2000 ingredients, from millions of photos and match them with the staggering 20,000 recipes Kroger’s in-house chefs have written over the years. All of this takes place within a single, e-commerce-integrated social platform.
There is a fundamental absurdity in our nation's food system. 40% of the food produced in the U.S. is thrown away, while many Americans struggle with hunger. Chefbot gives the average family the ability to save $1,500 worth of groceries and 250 lbs of food per year. Additionally, more people are cooking from home than ever before due to the global pandemic. We’ve seen grocery sales increasing by 30% and upwards across America, and our social listening indicates people are looking for inspiration as they venture deeper into their pantries.
As more people use Chefbot, its intelligence grows, creating not only a better product, but new opportunities to reach new customers at massive scale. We supported Chefbot’s launch with a full marketing ecosystem, creating the Chefbot Kroji who starred in our how-to videos and social content. Our launch also included influencer partnerships with famous foodies and novice cooks, showing how easy Chefbot is to use and inspiring social media users to use Chefbot to reduce their food waste.
As one of the largest retailers in the United States, Kroger is on a constant mission to redefine the customer experience. With that in mind and inspired by Kroger’s Zero Hunger | Zero Waste program, we set out to create a customer-centric solution to reduce food waste and reinforce Kroger’s brand positioning. To that, three main goals directed our strategy:
As a product Chefbot:
Knows 2000+ ingredients and learning
Can pull from 20,000 recipe responses in seconds
Is available to 330 million twitter users
Can save the average american family $1500 and 250lbs of food per year.
Is Kroger’s most successful social campaign ever
As a campaign, Chefbot generated the most conversation in Kroger’s 137 year history. Chefbot is still going strong, getting smarter and more helpful with every ingredient it sees.
