Foodie.fm Helps You Grocery Shop Smarter

Foodie.fm is that obvious thing that I always knew I needed but could not think of. There’s about a million different ToDo list apps and cooking apps that help you do partly what Foodie.fm does, but not really.

Foodie.fm enables smart grocery shopping by allowing the user to browse different recipes and then add that meal to their shopping cart. It lets me see different meals and then breaks them down into the needed ingredients in just the right amounts and once I tab ‘Add to cart’ it ads it to my shopping list on my phone. Now, here’s the beauty. Foodie’s back end is connected to all the stores in a given chain (They just announced a partnership with S-Ryhmä in Finland) and the server technology learns from what I like to buy and starts to …wait for it… make recommendations to me when such ingredients or products are on sale in my local store (iPhone lets the service know where I live and recommends me to choose a store as my local shop). You can get the iPhone App here.

Foodie.fm is a Finnish startup and the company is formed from the old Navicore team which was acquired by the Swedish WayFinder in 2007. After Vodaphone bought Navicore,  its operations were run down in Finland. This is when the guys re-grouped their old team and started to build Foodie.fm about a year ago. Foodie.fm team includes Kalle Koutajoki, Samuli Marttila and Atte Kojo.

The company is aiming to create a platform that is media agnostic. For example, now they have the iPhone app out, but they are already working on Facebook and other media, however they can best reach the Finnish families that eat. Once Finland is conquered Foodie.fm is aiming to go international.

The company’s business model, plain and simple, is to provide a one-to-one marketing channel for the stores to push their products. Yet, in a way that adds value instead of pissing me off with offers I’m not interested in.

Now all I need is Foodie to give me the list of romantic recipes, optimize that to her interests in her Facebook profile and I’m set for a dinner date. When you think about it, this should not be that far out. Foodie’s magic is in the server technology or the infrastructure and in the relationships with the grocery stores. If they’d open their APIs later on the application I just described, that should not be hard to do. This, I believe, would also a spark a flood of all kinds of useful food and shopping related applications. Let’s hope they open the API before long so I can get on that date.