For a company like Kitchen Stories, a young, constantly changing startup, it's good form not to revel in the past but to always look into the future. We have therefore committed ourselves to constantly adapting to the circumstances, to continuously revise our products, both for our users (B2C) and for our cooperation partners (B2B), in order to be optimally positioned for the future. This was also the case in the crazy year 2020, when everything was different than usual.
True to our values of “Stay curious and hungry, keep an open mind, don't accept the status quo,” we have continued to develop the Kitchen Stories platform throughout the year. The result is convincing, value-added products for our partners and users.
We've been publishing recipes digitally since 2014, but since this fall, all Kitchen Stories fans (and those who want to become one) have been able to pick them up, leaf through them, write down notes, mark their favorites with donkey ears and embellish them with a few splashes of sauce. True to our motto “Anyone Can Cook”, our cookbook is all about successful recipes for a quick dinner that inspire beginners as well as experienced amateur chefs.
But why is a startup whose product is a cooking platform with thousands of recipes publishing the digital world and launching a cookbook? It was a logical, strategic step for our female founders:
“We want to invest more in our brand. We are still very young and primarily known digitally. A print product is a very good opportunity to create more touchpoints and to make the brand better known and established. A printed product has yet another form of legitimacy.”
At Kitchen Stories, everything comes from a single source: From programmers to chefs, everyone is in one place, our office in Berlin, which covers over 1,700 square meters. Here, not only is the code for app and product features written, collected, processed and analyzed, but recipes are also developed, tested and shot. This is where creative storytelling ideas and innovative concepts for our cooperation partners are created. Our typical Kitchen Stories content is created day by day in four show kitchens and two studios.
When there was a major lock down in April 2020, this also initially presented us with major challenges. We had to somehow manage to move our shooting sets home to the employees. But just moving an entire set from one location to another? Didn't work. And should our chefs and editors now be in front of and behind the camera themselves at the same time? It didn't work either.
Did you go! Without further ado, we slightly modified our previously common formats, which were created in our “glossy kitchens” with an entire production team. That's how we were able to bring our community even closer to us by taking them home with us. This is how the now established formats such as the “Forgotten Ingredient” challenge or “Cooking with...” were created. Authentic content with high identification potential for our community.
For users, the price of using free digital food offerings is often the enduring mass and invasive advertising: clumsy advertising messages on large-format banners, which significantly impair the user experience. Stories can be told about every company, every brand and every product that are unique and exciting and engaging for the target group.
In our Brand Stories, we combine the strengths of Kitchen Stories in a new advertising product: We tell authentic stories about our partners' brands and products, which we enrich with outstanding content — and in doing so involve our community. A spread becomes an indispensable ingredient for outstanding baking projects, a cooking pot becomes a trip around the world or a video streaming offer becomes an Oscar-ready snack event.
The special thing: Costs only arise for qualified story views. These are calls where users have really interacted with the content, for example by liking, saving, sharing, commenting on it, or engaging with it long and intensively.
In June of this year, we launched the “Cookbook+” in-app feature. It is the first payment feature of Kitchen Stories, whose content and use have so far been offered exclusively free of charge.
While users in the Kitchen Stories app have already been able to save our recipes in self-created cookbooks and add them to shopping lists, the new additional feature allows them to search for recipes from the Internet, outside the Kitchen Stories world, and also save them in their cookbooks. This allows the community to manage all their favorite recipes in just one digital location. The cookbook+ feature therefore not only contributes to the user experience, but also simplifies the (cooking) life of our users.
Environmental protection and sustainability are now important topics on the agenda for many companies. This also applies to our partners. Nutrition and the question of how we must change it in order to contribute to climate protection play an important role in their communication. As food and community experts, we are increasingly being asked how interested our community is in sustainable nutrition and vegan or vegetarian recipes.
In our “Food for Future” content series, we wanted to find out how our eating and buying habits could impact the world. For four weeks, we published various articles and recipes on the topics of meat, meat alternatives, dairy products and fish and seafood in order to shed light on them thematically on the one hand, but also to give concrete ideas for cooking day on the other.
We too were able to learn a lot as part of our research and discussions with the community. Our eyes were opened to our own content and the ways in which we could become better as a company.
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