Allrecipes Uses Beacons to Spice Up App

Allrecipes, the operator of food-focused social-networking website Allrecipes.com, has boosted the rate of downloads and use of its Dinner Spinner app by 50 percent in northern Ohio, where it has installed Bluetooth beacons within 58 Marc's stores. A beacon, provided by Footmarks, is mounted at the entrance to every Marc's store, where it transmits a unique ID number that a Dinner Spinner user's smartphone receives when he or she enters the store. The app then uses that ID to determine that shopper's store location, and to access local weather and product promotion information.

Based on that data, the app displays recommended recipes, along with a list of ingredients. Versions of the Dinner Spinner app are available for IOS and Android devices.

When a shopper's smartphone detects a Footmarks Bluetooth beacon at a Marc's store, the Dinner Spinner app displays recommended recipes, based on the local weather conditions and what's on sale at that store.

Allrecipes' Corbin de Rubertis

For several years, Allrecipes has been providing location-based food information to its website's visitors, employing the cellular or router information for a user's smartphone or computer as he or she employs a web browser to access a recipe. When an individual views a recipe, the service can link his or her location data with sales information from area stores, in order to identify which merchants in that individual's vicinity sell the necessary ingredients, as well as where any of those items are on sale. Since Allrecipes launched the service, the company reports, users began doubling or tripling the amount of time they spend on its website, and sales at participating stores increased by 5 percent.