As it moves more aggressively into the food sector, Amazon is partnering with several well-established websites devoted to food and recipes. Its Prime members will see website buttons on those sites that link to food and kitchen equipment on Amazon's pages.
The industry newsletter Food Drive reports that the arrangement is with top sites owned by Fexy Media, Serious Eats and Simply Recipes. Special sponsored recipes on those sites will feature Amazon Prime "Buy Now" buttons that eligible shoppers can click to add ingredients to their carts.
In turn, Prime Now's site will also feature the recipes and allow customers to buy related ingredients.
Fexy Media? What's that, you might ask. Well, 8 food sites, 23 million visitors a month, according to ComScore.
It's a small but fast-growing company that grew out of Allrecipes.com, another Seattle'based food site. Allrecipes has grown into a powerhouse that's the internet's top-ranked library of recipes, with user engagement across the globe. Originally freestanding, it was bought and sold by Reader's Digest, and is now part of Meredith Publishing.
Fexy, for its part, was founded in late 2014 by Lisa Sharples, who had spent almost six years as president of Allrecipes.com; her husband Cliff, a former exec with Home Away; and Ben Sternberg, an investment adviser who previously held a top role at Cheezburger. They quickly raised $6 million from investors for their venture, which is based in an office park on Mercer Island.
The trio's company, originally called Teneology, was founded with the intention of creating a digital media portfolio of food-focused brands popular with the 21-49 female demographic. Perhaps their most important acquisition was a 15-year-old cooking blog called Simply Recipes, led by Elise Bauer, which offers suggestions for millennials who want to cook at home, from scratch.
They also acquired RoadFood, a husband-and-wife blog written by Jane and Michael Stern, and Serious Eats, which describes itself as "a destination for delicious."
"We are very deliberate about our acquisition strategy as we build a complementary portfolio of food-focused brands," said Cliff Sharples. And what are the others? The Food Lab is one; Relish is another; and there's also a consulting division to advise companies on tactics to reach their target demographic.
Jeff Wells, an industry analyst for Food Drive, points out that grocers have long enticed shoppers with recipes and tips designed to "inspire creative dishes and bigger baskets." The "Buy Now" buttons on popular food websites are an extension of this proven strategy by "narrowing the space between this content and the point of purchase."
If Amazon Prime Now's promotion with Fexy is successful, Wells speculates it could open the door to further partnerships, not just for Amazon but for its brick & mortar Whole Foods division as well.
This story also appears today on Forbes.com
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