What Happened
Whirlpool, a leading manufacturer of connected home appliances, announced on Thursday that it is acquiring Yummly, a recipe site with personalized recommendations and search. Beyond recipes, Yummly has also partnered with Instacart for one-hour grocery delivery in select cities.
This acquisition will allow Whirlpool to tap into Yummly’s recipe database to enhance its products by, for example, create better Alexa skills for its smart kitchen appliances, which added support for Amazon’s digital voice assistant earlier this year. For example, which the vast library of personalized recipes, the company will be able to make a smart fridge that can offer suggestions for home-cooked meals.
More importantly, perhaps, is the vast amount of user data on food and grocery preferences as well as cooking-related behavioral data that Whirlpool will gain with this acquisition. Whirlpool can apply insights from this data to cater to customers’ kitchen habits better and improve their products accordingly.
What Brands Need To Do
This acquisition underscores Whirlpool’s commitment to creating connected home appliances with a superior user experience. As one of the world’s largest digital recipe platforms, Yummly boasts more than 20 million registered users, and the user data and cooking-related information that Whirlpool will now have access to will give the company a nice edge as the competition in the smart home space heats up. More brands should be thinking about how they can gain access to relevant consumer data and use it to supercharge your product or service.
Source: TechCrunch