How Food Social Cracked Shopify's New Channel
"Shop has this amazing opportunity to convert shoppers into people that are being entertained by shoppable content."
Bill Staley built the first Shop Mini to launch on Shopify's Shop app. Food Social brings 10,000+ shoppable recipes to 200 million potential users. We dig into why Shop is Shopify's most underrated channel, how personalization matches recipes to purchase history, and why intent-based shopping beats interruption marketing every time.
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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.
Kurt Elster • 00:17.160
In in the Shopiverse, the Shopify world, there's ShopApp. This app that I think is slept on. I think it is this fabulous opportunity that a lot of Shopify store owners don't necessarily realize is already out there doing work for them. Is it often, you know, is making their store available in this native app that it's really quite convenient. You know, if you When I place an order on a Shopify store, often at the end it'll say, hey, did you want to track your order with Shop? And that's how they hook you. This app is free. It does a really good job of tracking deliveries. But then once you're in it, oh, you could start seeing uh offers from stores. And I just logged into it and looked and I saw. I think every every abandoned card I ever had showed up in this app from Shopify stores. They sync this stuff. And the other neat trick we do with it is uh it'll collect reviews for you and then we sync those back into uh our are Shopify online stores through, you know, whatever reviews app that store may use. And so the Shop app is out there and you just like out of the box by default doing all these wonderful things for your store. I wish more people would play with it. And it just got even better, right? In the Shopify universe, we love for the online store, especially, we love our apps. You know, the average online store could have 30, 40 apps in it. I mean, just wild. Point of sale, you can extend it with apps. Well, shop app, you can is you can extend that with apps too, and they're called shop minis. And I just played with a shop mini for the first time uh about two minutes ago. And I am joined by a gentleman, Bill Staley from Food Social, who built the first Shop Mini to launch. So, Bill, I I'm gonna pick your brain about this. You're gonna teach us about shop minis. Um so all right, number one, the tell us about what yours does. What is food social as a shop mini?
Bill Staley • 02:13.379
So we first of all we didn't set out to build the first one. We just wanted to be a part of this new wave of consumer-facing minis. So to sort of contextualize this, the previous generation of minis We're more B2B. Um and so our own market, Food Social, so stepping even further back, Food Social is a recipe sharing platform for creators and brands. We host over 10,000 recipes from hundreds of creators. and brands, food brands. And it's a great home for these creators to share their content. So recipes, posts, meal plans, It's all shoppable to these brands in our ecosystem too. And so we run our brand architecture through Shopify. So brands can join Uh in under five minutes, if they're really good. Uh and that's actually using Shopify's collective technology, which I also really love.
Kurt Elster • 03:06.120
I do love I enjoy Collective. We just set it up uh this week for a store.
Bill Staley • 03:10.840
Collective is so cool. Oh and I could do a whole episode on Collective too.
Kurt Elster • 03:14.660
Alright, f but collective is not shop minis. Alright, focus. Focus shop minis.
Bill Staley • 03:18.980
So it's a home for creators and brands, and the home cook gets to take we take them through the whole funnel from Recipe discovery all the way to product purchase. So that's our ecosystem. We have a dedicated app, a website. And we're really aiming to be this source content home for the recipe creators because it's a lot of work to make a recipe and share it. And so Oh let me stop you there.
Kurt Elster • 03:44.320
I will you we've worked with enough food brands to know that it those recipes are table stakes if you're in that space. It makes such amazing, highly relevant, applicable uh successful organic content. Just blog posts, uh, you know, a Shopify online store blog called Recipes with recipes that then link to your products and let you showcase you know, your ingredients or you know, whatever it is that you sell that's related to the recipe. So I am big believer in recipes as content.
Bill Staley • 04:14.280
Exactly. And a lot of brands really like working with creators and influencers because they do Such a nice job of creating authentic content that helps the home cook really connect to the product and like use cases. So we've essentially built a lightweight version of Food Social that works within shops, uh, within the shop app as a mini. And so what our Mini does is it brings over 10,000 recipes from our library, from creators, has shoppable recipes that then the users on shop can browse. They can save, they can shop them. And really what we've aimed to do is not just bring this robust content library into shop. but also to work alongside Shop's product team to deliver on their three big goals. And one of them is product catalog inclusion The second one is it's personalization with the product catalog and your purchase history. And the third one is something that reinforces the daily habit. Uh the daily habit of using the shop app. But recipes do that naturally. You can you'll find it I have to eat every day. Yeah, yeah. And uniquely, so of all the creative things out there. Food is the one that touches all five senses. And so you you not you can consume recipe content by looking at it. it. But to truly appreciate it, you need to make it and you need products and ingredients with it too. And so recipes are actually such a unique creative content type. in the uh commerce ecosystem. So that's where we come in, where we've built this mini that uh consumers can connect with and check out recipes that they can then They'll be served recipes based on their browsing and purchasing history. They'll be able to see timely content. So right now we have a lot of Thanksgiving content on the Mini. Uh we also have an immersive uh video feed. It's not launched today, but by the time the show goes live it will be. So we'll talk about it in present tense.
Kurt Elster • 06:21.340
I I did see the the Thanksgiving content though, right? We're recording, you know, right before Thanksgiving. And sure enough, it was like, hey, here's some recipes and um immediately I was like, oh, a couple of these look Look pretty good. Uh fortunately we I don't have to worry about it. We're eating out this year.
Bill Staley • 06:38.180
Yeah. The the food food is so interesting to me just in general because we all eat It's this thing, it's on the back of my shirt, I won't turn around, but the love of food connects all of us. And it's um much like music, I think music and food are next-door neighbors, but Food, you can connect to uh previous experiences, places, people, um, by just thinking about certain types of food. And I think everybody can do that. I can picture Eating cookie dough out of the mixer bowl in my my parents' kitchen when I was a little kid.
Kurt Elster • 07:13.840
Do you in this so for the shot minis, do you have a sense of the scale of Shop App. Like I'm sure we could figure out how many users are there, but you know, from your perspective, like seeing installs or usage, right. What Uh how does it what's your sense of scale here?
Bill Staley • 07:30.680
Sure. So Shop claims hundreds of millions of users on the app. So that's the addressable user base. Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot. And you could you could make some assumptions about what percentage of that would be people who are interested in food or recipes, and it's it's probably a large portion because we all eat. But to qualify this, they're still in pre-release. So we were the first. They haven't even really announced it or rolled it out yet. None of this mini content is in the home feed on the app, so it's really only discoverable, and I we just walked through this together if you click on the Magnifying glass, so the search icon, or categories at the top. Those are the two places that you can find these new minis, but it's it's still pre-release. So we're We're very excited about the upside potential here. I mean, there's a huge addressable market of people in the Shop app that could see and shop and enjoy this content.
Kurt Elster • 08:26.820
And you said it's it it does personalization. So it's like as an example, I have shopped for I've bought a lot of seasonings online from Shopify stores. I enjoy fun seasonings, you know, like my my friend Casey Bards at Tactic Calories. And You know, how does that personalization work? Is it like, you know, I have to opt how is the merchant, you know, what am I doing to take advantage of this?
Bill Staley • 08:51.440
Yeah, it it it does it for you. So there are hooks for uh products that you've browsed and products that you've purchased And what we do is we access the library of products and then make recipe recommendations based on what you've looked at. So if you've looked at salt or vanilla or olive oil, we have hundreds, if not thousands, of recipes that you can then make with with that type of product. And it's it's interesting, right? Because you have some products are hyper specific, like you might have a barbecue rub that has a very specific flavor profile. Or you might have something that's more of a generic ingredient, like a olive oil or a salt. So we can do both of those things with the way that we match content to ingredients and products in their in their universe.
Kurt Elster • 09:36.779
Are people opting into this or are you just grabbing You're surfacing the products.
Bill Staley • 09:43.020
Yep. Right now we're surfacing we're surfacing recipe content based on their searching history. And so In this pre-release world, we have Food Social has 4,500 products in its market, and we're doing the recipe serving based on browsing in the mini. But the long term potential here is so cool is we'll be able to do the entire shop product catalog and make correlations of recipes based on your purchasing and browsing history.
Kurt Elster • 10:14.880
So the the opportunity do you know how many products are included in the catalog? It has to be massive.
Bill Staley • 10:21.680
It it is massive. I don't have a number, but Shopify has done such a great job with their classification taxonomy so that we can drill down and make product association based on how they have products categories. So we're we're still in the very early phases of exploring that, but that's one of the real opportunities is going big and broad in the shop the shop app.
Kurt Elster • 10:45.340
And then the only thing that you know I can imagine someone potentially pushing back on, not that I know you know why why you would, more eyeballs is more eyeballs, but You know, like, oh no, I don't want my products, you know, being showcased with someone else's, as though that's not how like all marketplaces work. But that like I can hear it. You know, that would be the the pushback on it.
Bill Staley • 11:05.980
I've I've heard it and I I think that it's a really interesting challenge, right? There's there's the challenge of uh competition among brands that are similar, especially with the generic type products. Uh and then there's also the challenge that we have yet to tackle of the matching. And the creators of the recipes really care about that. It's actually a sticking point with other solutions out there where if they have a recipe and their ad network or something else is serving a product that is a mismatch. They get really upset. And I'm a creator. I've been a creator for 15 years, which is how I came to doing all this. We we really care about that. We want the match to be good because we want the recipe to be executed.
Kurt Elster • 11:50.500
That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. If they don't have a good experience. Right. You know, with the end result, it's not there it's not gonna be a good time for anybody. Uh at what point does anyone pay for this, right? Like what's the what's the cost?
Bill Staley • 12:03.260
Yeah. Well the the economic engine is people shopping through these recipes on the mini, and I think each Each mini is developing its own use case, but I think, you know, for us we're again we're we're very early into this arrangement, and so it's It's a little bit unclear over time how this is monetized in a long-term sustainable way, but people are buying things through these recipes, and so there's a path to that.
Kurt Elster • 12:32.740
And you mentioned that you use well if they're buying through the recipes, I imagine it like ends up being revenue share, would be my guess. Or you do like per cost. Or like, you know, flat rate. Like 99 cents, you know, per referral. I don't know. I'm spitballing. Um so and you you mentioned you're using Shopify Collective. Um I don't understand how like and where does that fit in the workflow here.
Bill Staley • 12:57.460
Yeah. So to step back, our our platform, our web platform with our app, we host these same recipes. And that's a real efficiency for the creators because they share it once and then we help them distribute it out. It's a big pain point for them. The brands then uh our market uh plugs in to these recipes and so we've built custom code that that does that. And we're leveraging Shopify's collective tech Technology. So we do a combination of um, and they they're constantly evolving their product too, collective. But we'll go out and look for brands that we know creators will be excited about. Where you know they they fit nicely into recipes or they're trendy or some combination thereof. And we invite them to be a part of our platform and our market. And it's Joining the market is just like the first dimension that brands typically grasp, but to really drink the Kool-Aid of food social and where everything in this industry is going in general is it's all about community. And so What what we what we talked about before is that the brands, the recipes are a key for them, but if they don't have somebody in-house developing them, they're gonna want to use creators uh or some sort of creative agency to make these recipes. And so the brands want to work with creators and that sense of community where everybody is working together towards as common goal is where the brands really end up buying into this. So collective has been a great mechanism for search and discovery and for them to join and get their product catalog integrated like that. It it pulls in their pricing dynamically, their product details, their images, all that stuff. And so it's very, very easy for them to join. And we use it. It's a fantastic tool for us to grow. We we added 150 brands in the last twelve months to our market.
Kurt Elster • 14:55.360
I imagine like approaching creators, dealing with creators, the resistance is going to be Oh no, another platform, right? Like adding another channel is it more you're essentially saying, like here is additional homework for you, sir. So Like do you and I get that you're say you're also like, well here's here's the beneficial outcome. You know, w what's the thing that gets them over that hurdle of Oh another thing to do.
Bill Staley • 15:21.400
Yeah. And I I I've you're right, and I've heard them all. Uh you know, the other the other one that I hear often from like legacy bloggers is I can't have my recipe anywhere other than my blog. But We're collectively going towards this future where everything is available to everyone everywhere, right? Like all the time.
Kurt Elster • 15:43.399
Yeah, this idea of like if you put the content on the web, give up the idea of any kind of exclusivity.
Bill Staley • 15:50.360
Yeah.
Kurt Elster • 15:51.240
Right? Like it it is out there. It is now and even if it's not exclusive, like, okay, you're gonna go You're gonna go track all that down and then enforce your IP. Good luck. You know, have fun wasting time and money.
Bill Staley • 16:04.160
Yeah, there's there's so many pain points there for the creators. But but the main ones are But first, running a blog is actually quite hard. So we solve tech. They they can operate their food social profile just like a blog. It hosts their recipes with the appropriate microformatting and SEO. uh posts, collections just like Pinterest, um all sorts of content types. So they don't have to think about tech. It also solves monetization for them too. So we provide monetization channels for them to uh earn from their recipes and it's something we're fine-tuning over time, but but that content has such a high value to the home cook and to the brands, and so we help the creators monetize And it's also such an isolating experience being a creator on your own, where you're in your kitchen, you're making things on your own, you're on your phone, on your own. Putting people together in a community is actually such a valuable thing to these creators. We hear it all the time. So it's not just a platform, but it's a community where we have we can weekly happy hours. We have calls where creators and brands can meet and work together. We have campaigns where the creators can receive the products from the brands and make recipes that the brands free Freaking love. Um, and it's it's it's community is a great buzzword, but it without demonstrating the tangible effects of community, then it's just like a trendy buzzword that you're using it. But it's something we're actually doing and and a really valuable piece of our strategy.
Kurt Elster • 17:41.020
The yeah. No, that that community helps. It's certainly like with with word of mouth with driving adoption. Right. So I if I'm you know an existing brand on Shopify and I have recipes already as part of in my content marketing strategy. How do I get those into the food social shop mini?
Bill Staley • 18:01.720
Yeah, yeah, you can bring them. That's that's the great thing about what we're doing is that brands and creators are very similar. It's and creators are brands in a way too. They have their own businesses. It's just that many don't have their own products. But brands have profiles on food social just like creators. do that host their recipe content, their product catalog. And so brands can bring in those recipes too. We have very pain-free ways to import recipes. So again, that's one of the parts that's so hard about recipe creation is it's loading it to multiple places is such a pain. And so we actually have tools where you can just import your library. And many of these brands do. They know that increasing their recipe distribution increases their their shoppable content density across the ecosystem.
Kurt Elster • 18:53.180
And so brands Yeah I I want as large a footprint as I can. Give me more surfaces. Like once I've made that content, let's go ahead and put that everywhere that will take it.
Bill Staley • 19:03.160
Brands are more flexible and savvy around recipe distribution than creators are And so we'll see the we'll see the sophistication of creators around that idea come up, and we do see that come up. But brands know that the more places my stuff is, especially shoppable, the better.
Kurt Elster • 19:23.200
So with uh yeah tell me about your experience developing a shop mini compared to uh some of your other you know development experience. Yeah. Hard you hard, easy, impressive.
Bill Staley • 19:37.220
Painful. I'll relay what that what our developers said because I'm I'm not a developer, but We were lucky because they were changing their coding language and I don't know how much I should talk about that, but it's they've made it highly accessible to developers. They have a very robust SDK software developer kit. And it was actually pretty easy for us to build this and uh our contacted contact at Shopify, his name's David Hoffman. They're all about making this easy for developers to adopt this coding language and build things to to rapidly iterate to rapidly ship things And it certainly looked true on our end too. It was not a heavy lift for us to build this mini, and we've built a pretty robust one. The one thing that we had to our benefit was that it was a coding language that our developer knew well, and the app that we had built a year ago was also based on that language. And so there's a little bit of a mutual benefit there too, where that now this cutting-edge stuff that we've built for our Mini is is giving us food for thought for what we have on our platform as well, too.
Kurt Elster • 20:47.820
It's good. Yeah, I'm glad I I'm not surprised. The Shopify developer experience is, you know, always really top notch and they go out of their way to you know make it pleasant to make it fun uh for developers to work with and have always iterated quickly really like that would be You know, the the sole pain point with it is it moves so quickly is you know things change. And so sometimes it's like, all right, you know, things moved around. But that's good. You know, I don't want it to be static. If I log in Yeah, after six months and things look exactly the same. That's probably not a great sign for my platform. So I'm happy to see those changes occur. But Yeah, you gotta keep up with it.
Bill Staley • 21:26.440
Yeah, we we we take a very much a startup mindset because we are a startup and so exactly like we just said, if things are the same in six months from now, something is maybe going wrong. So you want wanna be continually improving, being data driven about the decision making that especially around commerce and conversion rate, you have to be data driven about what you're doing. Otherwise you're just a hobbyist about it.
Kurt Elster • 21:50.460
So where where do you go from here? Well, what's next for food social? You know, your shop mini. I'm sure you've got uh uh a feature roadmap in development.
Bill Staley • 21:59.760
We we do, and a little bit of it is qu crystal ball, but the one that we're working on right now is we're already prototyping what this content could look like in shop's main feed and that's that's a a big goal of ours is to make sure that that content gets distributed in the main app too and it it ought to be because The content and this I'm not I'm not involved in product strategy on Shopify's side, but if I were Shopify, I would look at it and say, I've got this 200 million plus consumer audience And I see what's going on on places like Instagram and TikTok with social shopping. Let's look at the intentionality of who's on those platforms. I go on Instagram and not so much TikTok, but I go on those platforms to be entertained and to kill a little bit of time. And they try selling something to me. Shop has this amazing opportunity to convert shoppers into people that are being entertained by shoppable content.
Kurt Elster • 22:54.419
That is a clever way to look at it.
Bill Staley • 22:56.340
I'm so excited. I like get goosebumps when I think about it because that consumer mindset of going from the app icon on your phone to the actions you're taking within the app. are wildly different. I open the Amazon app and I think one thing I opened the shop app and I think, you know, shop cash and perks and tracking products and see and now it's gonna be seeing really cool shoppable content of all different types. that I can then act on to. And so for the product roadmap, it is being at that bleeding edge and working in conjunction with their team. on how we can best serve this broader consumer audience in the Shop app and bring this incredible cool content to these consumers that may not even know that they're looking for this type of stuff. But we want to delight them with these recipes that feel like hand-picked or very perceptive about their that that align with what their shopping habits are.
Kurt Elster • 23:52.980
The no, you're absolutely right. And you know, with this shop app thinking about it, it's like the It competes with for sure it competes with Amazon, right? Like I've got this huge catalog of products at various sellers and I could look through it. It also has the conven it has utility, this convenience where I, you know, I could track all my orders in there. Um, of course the bonuses of like this really tight integration with the the Shopify online store platform. You know, that's like that's what gets the use for me, right? Is like deliveries and notifications and and tracking. And um, but then now we're gonna add entertainment to it, content, edutainment, you know, some of this stuff. And that that's interesting. It's like, oh now essentially you're handing me a hybrid between Amazon, Instagram, and or like, you know, TikTok and my my deliveries app that I like, right?
Bill Staley • 24:46.300
That's kinda that's exactly the way I view it.
Kurt Elster • 24:48.780
That's interesting.
Bill Staley • 24:49.660
Yeah. But you're but you're coming at it from the mindset of consumer first, which I think is of incredible benefit to the brands. The brands currently, and not just in food, all brands, they're trying to backdoor it on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where they're trying to persuade an entertainment audience to buy something
Kurt Elster • 25:11.100
Right. I think it's a kind of interruption marketing.
Bill Staley • 25:14.139
Interruption marketing. That's right. But this same person. who wants to be entertained on those platforms also is a shopper and they're using shop and Amazon and other platforms to do that shopping. And so they want that. Yeah, it's about the intent. It's about the intent. And that's where I get really excited about the opportunity.
Kurt Elster • 25:33.260
You're right, pairing those things with a different intent. Oh, suddenly this is a very different animal, isn't it? Yeah. And with that, you know, just the size of that audience. Huge potential here. All right. I'm you got me excited about shop again.
Bill Staley • 25:46.840
It's cool.
Kurt Elster • 25:49.640
Uh anything else? What's your, you know, where can we learn more? What's your site?
Bill Staley • 25:53.600
Yeah, so you can find Food Social on all the main social channels where it's very hard to reach very hard to reach you, but you can also download the Food Social app for free in both the iOS in the Android store and check out the food social mini on the shop app. Use it, you can save your favorites on there, you can shop them, and uh I'm always I love hearing feedback from brands, creators, and consumers.
Bill Staley • 26:19.039
And so I always welcome emails. You can just reach me at bill at foodsocial. io send me an email. I want to hear from you That's great. Bill, Food Social, thank you so much.