Startup rejected by Lord Sugar, acquired by Samsung launches to solve supermarket shopping nightmare

shopping

Whisk, the world’s smartest food platform acquired by Samsung NEXT earlier this year, has announced the launch of a set of multi-platform apps, featuring a new, connected recipe box and collaborative shopping lists.

Whisk’s founder, Nick Holzherr, is a former Apprentice finalist and Whisk itself got rejected by Lord Sugar but was this year acquired by Samsung NEXT for £170,000 and is achieving great success.

Available now on the iOS and Android app stores, web, Chrome extension, Bixby, Alexa, & Google voice assistant, Whisk empowers users with a faster way to plan and shop for meals by turning saved recipes into collaborative, smarter shopping lists. All lists are instantly shoppable across 32 integrated online grocery retailers across the world, or users can take an optimized list to buy in-store.

The average grocery store shopping trip takes 41 minutes – that’s a staggering 50 hours per year spent in the grocery store. The $11 trillion global grocery market is going through many changes as millennials and gen Z are buying in very different ways than their parents. 76% are sharing the grocery shopping responsibility, shopping at an average of 4.4 stores, with 70% of the population predicted to buy groceries online by 2025.

“Over half of the U.S. population still makes shopping lists using pen and paper, yet most people are looking for food inspiration digitally. Hours are spent looking for food content online – seeking new and healthier meals. However, the data shows people generally end up cooking the same 7-9 dishes on repeat. There’s a fundamental disconnect between the online and offline that Whisk can help connect,” said Nick Holzherr, Head of Product, Whisk at Samsung NEXT.

By using Whisk, consumers can connect their recipe discovery to meals on the table by saving, organizing and turning those recipes into shareable shopping lists. From any platform with Whisk, users benefit from integrated nutrition data, serving size adjustments, automatically combined items across recipes, and a shopping list that can be sorted by aisle or recipe.

New features give users the ability to:

  • Turn Recipes into Shopping Lists: Turn any recipe into a collaborative shopping list to buy online or in-store. Save recipes from Whisk’s partner publishers, including the Food Network and BBC Good Food, and turn them into shopping lists in one click. Add some or all recipe ingredients to your list and easily uncheck the ingredients you already have.
  • Share Shopping Lists: Share recipes and collaborate on shopping lists with anyone via SMS, email or URL, so others can view or edit your list or save and shop your favorite recipes. If your hands are full, use voice assistant apps like Bixby, Alexa or Google Home to simply add items to the shopping list as you take inventory of your pantry or fridge.
  • Order Groceries Delivered To Your Door: Transform your shopping list into online grocery orders in seconds. Whisk finds and remembers your preferred store, enabling you to purchase from popular online grocers like Amazon Fresh, Tesco, Asda and Waitrose.
  • Take Whisk Anywhere: Use and sync Whisk across any device (mobile,web, Bixby, Alexa, & Google voice assistant, Chrome extension) to save, store and shop for recipes, anytime, from anywhere.
  • Make Smarter Food Decisions: Scale recipes to different serving sizes, view nutrition information and health scores, and automatically combine similar items across recipes.

Since 2013, Whisk has been powering half a billion connected food experiences per month across millions of online recipes with many of the world’s leading food publishers, brands, and retailers.

Whisk’s Food Genome is an intelligent deep learning-based natural language processing algorithm that maps the world’s food ingredients, their relationships, their properties (nutrition, perishability, flavour, categories) as well as offering food purchase options. It’s a combination of this deep ontological understanding of food with massive data about user behaviour that drives accurate, smart results from any source, at scale.