Helping customers create tasty meals

By Katie Buchanan

I have never been an adventurous cook and on weekday evenings I alternate the same handful of meals. I’m normally pretty hungry so the lack of variation has never bothered me much, until recently that is.
Before Christmas, I got a new flatmate who claims that she never cooks without a recipe. She introduced me to the Sainsbury’s ‘feed your family for a fiver’ recipes, which can be picked up in the entrance to a store or if you shop online can be found under their ‘recipe tips and ideas’ section. These recipe cards provide easy, quick and cheap recipes that are really tasty. Last night we had olive and pumpkin seed pasta, a flavour combination that I would never have tried previously.

Anyway, when I visited my local Sainsbury’s store on Saturday, I picked up this week’s recipe cards on my way in and then hunted round the store to get the ingredients. Often within each recipe is a slightly obscure ingredient that I am never sure where to find (this week it was pumpkin seeds). Whilst struggling to find the ingredients it struck me that it would be brilliant for the customer experience if all the ingredients were in one place alongside the recipe cards. This way you could very quickly get the ingredients for a couple of meals without searching around the store. This would be similar to the online experience where you can add all the ingredients for a recipe from the same page.

I wondered why Sainsbury’s have not done this? They must have thought of it and surely it would only help their customers and increase the use of the recipe cards? But then I thought about it from Sainsbury’s perspective rather than mine (the customer). They want their customers to go up and down as many aisles as possible increasing the likelihood of impulse purchases; in addition to this the ingredients are normally from their basic range which I assume are less profitable for them. This I thought, is another example of the trade-off between the business and customer needs.

I wonder though if there is more of a happy medium – perhaps there could be one featured recipe of the week with the ingredients for this recipe in one place. It would be interesting to see what the impact of this would be on the purchasing of the recipe ingredients.