Brief:
- Knorr, the Unilever-owned food and beverage brand, debuted an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that offers personalized meal suggestions based on a person's Instagram feed, according to The Drum. "Eat Your Feed" scans a smartphone user's Instagram account to provide recipe suggestions that include at least one Knorr ingredient.
- AnalogFolk, a creative digital agency based in London, developed the tool that uses visual recognition and individual image data and can be trained to understand posts and match them with items in the Knorr recipe database. Users can save the recipes or add the ingredients to their shopping basket for easy purchasing. Those who don't use Instagram can participate by completing a short quiz that serves up recipes based on a person's responses.
- To promote the tool, Knorr will open a pop-up restaurant at London's Jones & Sons on April 11, where diners will be served meals matched to their Instagram feeds.
Insight:
Instagram's parent company Facebook has collected a wealth of data about users that can be harnessed when its users allow third parties to gain access to their accounts. For example, Knorr's analysis can see that an Instagram user attended a snowboarding event in the Italian Alps to offer the meal idea of a One Pot Mushroom Ragout with Fusilli and Spinach, per The Drum.
"Eat Your Feed" isn't the first personalized recipe generator, but it's certainly a unique — and entertaining — use case for AI and visual recognition technology. Consumers can receive meal inspirations that relate to their own memories shared on Instagram in a fun feature that could spur even more social media sharing, as people post photos of meals they created from Knorr's recipe generator.
Meanwhile, cases like this will likely help consumers grow more comfortable with integrating emerging AI tech in their everyday lives.
The pop-up restaurant planned for next month is part of the broader campaign and serves as a fun way to generate buzz around the brand's new "Eat Your Feed" tool. By appealing to younger consumers' desire for authentic experiences, Knorr has created a wholly-owned interactive experience that's likely to spur plenty of earned media as diners snap and share photos of the event to social media, something Taco Bell did earlier this year by opening its test kitchen for reservations on Cinco de Mayo. By only opening the restaurant for one day, Knorr appears to be betting that a fear of missing out will further drive excitement around the event.
