In 2023, the Viennese startup Happy Plates took over the recipe platform ichkoche.at from Styria-Verlag, and now the next B2C product is coming. Originally started as a recipe site with a connection to supermarkets’ online shops, a smartphone app called happycart is now intended to establish a more direct connection to supermarkets for orders. In a first step, the app is designed as a shopping list to get rid of “cooking helplessness and recipe chaos”.
Happycart (free for iOS and Android) aims to differentiate itself from other shopping list apps by turning recipes into shopping lists, sharing functions with family and friends, saving favorite products, price and availability checks and organizing recipes. And: It should give users incentives to buy in supermarkets. The ranges from Interspar, Billa and Gurkerl.at in Austria as well as REWE and Knuspr in Germany are currently included, with more to follow. “We are currently talking to other retailers and are particularly interested in discounters, as the app no longer only focuses on online purchases,” said co-founder Simon Jacko to Trending Topics. This means: Hofer and Lidl could also be included.
Retailers and FMCG brands as B2B customers
What doesn’t work yet is ordering directly from the app – this currently only works via the online widget that is integrated into websites such as ichkoche.at. “The order function will be available in the next few weeks,” continued Jacko. In general, the monetization strategy is aimed at retailers and FMCG brands. “We offer retailers digital leaflets and offers and lead generation for online and offline purchases,” says Jacko. For FMCG brands, retail media advertising services would be offered, such as replacing branded products in the ingredient lists of recipes, prioritizing products in shopping lists and “shoppable links” that lead directly to the brands’ products.
At its core, Happy Plates is still about making shopping for cooking recipes as easy as possible. In 2023, the Viennese startup received investment from Stephan Zöchling, SQUER Invest, Michael Kamleitner, Hermann Futter, Andreas Tschas and Philipp Kinsky.
Happy Plates buys recipe giant ichkoche.at after investing millions
