Tasty’s Recipes Become Ready-to-Eat Meals With CookUnity

BuzzFeed’s recipe publisher, Tasty, is debuting a new foray into shoppable commerce through a partnership with premade meal delivery service CookUnity.

The deal means Tasty’s audience can order prepared versions of recipes featured in its video content—which was co-created with CookUnity chefs—allowing viewers to skip the cooking step, testing out new flavors or cuisines before taking on the challenge of finding the ingredients and preparing the dishes themselves.

Viewers watching Tasty‘s CookUnity recipes can click through directly to a shoppable, co-branded microsite where they can order premade meals from over 90% of the continental U.S., explained Mateo Marietti, co-founder and CEO of CookUnity.

“We haven’t offered this experience the Tasty audience before,” said Hannah Bricker, BuzzFeed’s general manager of Tasty and Lifestyle. While Tasty has an ongoing shoppable recipe program and cookware line with Walmart, this partnership is the first time viewers have been able to order premade dishes—and the first time CookUnity has partnered with a food-focused publisher.

It’s part of a growing trend toward shoppable content and commerce partnerships for publishers. With the rise of retail media, analysts have predicted that audience overlap—like those between a food content publisher and food delivery business, for example—will become more popular.

Tasty learned from audience surveys that half of its viewers were interested in premade meal delivery services. The company, which caters largely to a Gen Z and millennial audience (87% fall into those age groups), declined to share what portion of its revenue comes from commerce partnerships like this one, though it’s “an important piece of the puzzle,” Bricker said.

Marietti founded CookUnity in New York City in 2015 with the goal of bringing restaurant-quality meals to people’s homes through a subscription-based delivery service. It works with noted and up-and-coming chefs across the country to develop over 400 recipes so far, which are then made available for people to order a week in advance. They arrive chilled, not frozen, and ready to be heated and eaten. The company currently delivers over 1.5 million meals per month.

At launch, the partnership “includes some of the most popular Tasty recipes, but crafted every day by CookUnity chefs,” Marietti explained. CookUnity contributed some content to the project, but it was largely led by Tasty’s audience. Moving forward, he hopes to partner on more of the content, working with both Tasty creators and CookUnity chefs.

“We see a lot of nice overlap between the customer bases and brands and the offering,” Marietti said. “Up to this point, Tasty was offering digital experiences and content, and CookUnity was offering physical experiences and content, and now we’re bridging those two worlds.”

At launch, the average rating for Tasty recipes was 3.8 out of 5 based on 71 reviews—on the low end for CookUnity meals overall. But Marietti stressed that this partnership is about learning and adapting to find what consumers want.

“This [partnership] is all about learning from customers, what they love, what they want to see that they are not seeing yet,” he said. “Customers expect a consistent, reliable, seamless experience. … If a delivery is late, or if the food wasn’t great, there’s no storytelling, there’s no branding that can compensate for that. So we take that extremely seriously. [CookUnity] is a culinary company before a technology company.”