eMeals Introduces Brand-Building Program

Digital meal-planning service eMeals has created a promotional program to help food and beverage companies boost penetration in the online grocery channel, and Tyson Foods, The Coca-Cola Co. and Francis Ford Coppola Winery are among the first brands to join up. The BrandBuilder program aims to grow online brand sales through a combination of recipe discovery on eMeals’ 15 weekly meal plans, shoppable recipe content with brand placement on the service’s shopping lists, and related promotional opportunities.

Springdale, Ark.-based Tyson is using the program to lift online visibility and sales of its Tyson Chicken, Hillshire Farm and Ball Park Franks brands, Atlanta-based Coca-Cola is promoting categories of its beverages within the new eMeals Beverage Add-to-Cart functionality, and Francis Ford Coppola Winery, in Geyserville, Calif., is using the platform to increase brand recognition and online purchases via recommended wine pairings on eMeals menus.

When an eMeals subscriber chooses a recipe in any of the Tyson product categories or with a suggested Coca-Cola or Coppola beverage pairing, the branded recommendations automatically go on the weekly eMeals shopping list for one-tap online grocery fulfillment by Walmart, Kroger, Amazon, Instacart or Shipt, or for use for in-store shopping. The same benefits are available to other brands.

Among the platform’s advantages are a recipe-driven strategy employing eMeals’ recipe-development experience, the potential for brands to double sales in online grocery carts, the ability to repurpose eMeals-developed content for brand activation promotions in various channels, comprehensive shopping analytics providing basket insights such as which products are purchased through the eMeals app and which online grocery services are used, and a measurable return on ad spend, enabled by BrandBuilder's data analytics.

“Every food and beverage brand today is looking to grow their online grocery business,” said Forrest Collier, CEO of Birmingham, Ala.-based eMeals.  “Our BrandBuilder program offers a seamless solution that not only starts precisely where the consumer's meal journey starts – with recipe inspiration – but also taps into a subscriber base that comes back week after week to plan their family meals and uses our automatically generated ingredient lists to do their shopping. With 15 eating styles offering more than 100 new recipe choices every week, as well as a decade of meal-planning experience and back-end technology development that supports our BrandBuilder platform, we are uniquely positioned to help brands drive the visibility and sales they’re seeking in today's increasingly digital grocery landscape.” 

“eMeals has one of the best integrations I've seen for shoppable recipes, and that is helping us remove some of the friction between recipe inspiration and the actual grocery purchase,” noted Genevieve Mazzeo, who handles digital commerce at Tyson. “The more friction we can remove, the better for us as a manufacturer, for our retail partners, and ultimately for our shoppers.”