Contextual media and the future of grocery: A chat with Chicory CEO Yuni Baker-Saito

You’re searching for a foolproof lasagna recipe, you find one on a recipe page, and there’s an ad that allows you to jump to a grocery retailer and add all the ingredients to your basket for your next delivery or click and collect order.

This is the sort of experience enabled by Chicory, a platform that “combines contextually relevant content with engaging media experiences.”

We caught up with Chicory CEO Yuni Baker-Saito to get into the detail about food shopping and promotion online, including the complicated landscape of retail media, and some trivia about most popular recipes. We started by asking him what advertisers need to consider today.

Econsultancy: What advice would you give to somebody starting out on the brand side today in the rapidly changing grocery environment?

Yuni Baker-Saito: I would say that grocery and grocery marketing has seen its biggest evolution in many decades with the onset of retail media networks. And I would recommend to someone starting on the brand side, especially on the marketing side, to really go back to basics. In ad tech specifically, a lot of black boxing has occurred where you’re not really sure who you’re targeting, but the data says that you’re doing a good job. I think AI will only compound that problem around lack of transparency. So I would tell them that really digging in, understanding who they’re reaching, and when they’re reaching them is going to be their “North Star,” as this environment changes quickly.

There are so many partnerships happening in the programmatic / adtech / retail media ecosystem at the moment. Where does Chicory sit and what are your goals for reaching more shoppers and retailers?

Chicory believes that there’s content on the internet that drives commerce, and the future of advertising is what we call contextual commerce media. So, Chicory enables contextual advertising on this commerce-driving content. Today, we are the leaders in the grocery and CPG category, powering the largest contextual commerce media network for food. We partner with some of the top 10 recipe sites, including Warner Bros. Discovery and Hearst.

In ad tech specifically, a lot of black boxing has occurred… I think AI will only compound that problem around lack of transparency.

In terms of where we sit in the ecosystem – we believe that if there’s on-site retail media that reaches consumers on the retailer’s site in that buying moment, we are a second, more scalable layer above that where we’re reaching consumers who are in the buying moment but in that more specific planning phase when they’re looking at recipes. So, we partner with retail media networks in order to expand their reach to in-market grocery shoppers.

How heavily does your network rely on search? And what’s your view on the future of search, given all the experimentation with generative UX? Are we now, or might we soon be, in a tough spot for gaining clicks to recipes sites?

Our network relies fairly heavily on search, as do many open-web publishers. What’s interesting about generative UX is that, yes, it will certainly have an impact on traffic. However, our long-term thesis here is that for recipes, the author will still continue to matter. I don’t know if in the next five to ten years that AI will be so sophisticated that you would trust that their combinations of ingredients will actually yield good taste in the real world.

In its early days, I remember playing around with ChatGPT in order to produce recipes, and it’s certainly interesting to see what the output would be. It was pretty cool to be able to change recipes on the fly – for example, I had a spaghetti recipe and I asked ChatGPT to make the recipe more Japanese, and it suggested I add dashi and soy sauce. So I’m not sure if that necessarily would taste great, but if a food blogger or someone who’s actually made it and told me the right proportions of the right ingredients to add, maybe that works. So, our long-term thinking for our network is that the author for commerce-driving content still matters, which is future-proofing for their type of content.

How has Chicory developed over the past few years? The pandemic saw a surge in recipe-boxes – are grocers moving to take a bigger share of this demand for hassle-free prep?

Through the pandemic, we saw an increase in both recipe usage as well as online grocery. We didn’t necessarily see a surge in recipe-boxes but certainly more adoption of online grocery, period. So for Chicory, we’ve seen more demand to reach grocery shoppers in that moment when they’re viewing recipes. It’s certainly been a huge boon for our business. And more and more, especially as the ad tech ecosystem goes through signal loss, you’ll see that reaching consumers contextually like this is going to become increasingly important.

Do you have any trivia about which types of recipes and ingredients do well on your platform? e.g. Does Italian have a super high clickthrough? Are simple recipes most appealing?

Generally speaking, dinner recipes and holiday entertaining recipes tend to perform well because that’s often when consumers are seeking inspiration. More specifically, this summer, our network shows that consumers are drawn to simple meals, with keywords like ‘easy’, ‘simple’, ‘how-to’, and ‘lazy’ ranking in the top 20 seasonal recipes.

…as the ad tech ecosystem goes through signal loss, you’ll see that reaching consumers contextually like this is going to become increasingly important.

Year-to-date, the top performing recipes in our network are often hearty, main course dishes like Marry Me Chicken, Perfect Pot Roast, and Baked Feta Pasta. A good Chicory trivia question would be: What was the #1 recipe during Thanksgiving last year? Answer: Green Bean Casserole

What does your typical day look like as Chicory CEO?

I typically get up at 5:30am. I hang out with our one-year-old daughter until the very last minute, then I need to go to work. I take the subway to the office, where I read some sort of philosophy book. Right now I’m reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I’ll typically have some kind of leadership meeting, then lunch with the team. When we’re at the office, we have what we call “lunch club” where we sit and eat lunch together in our common area. Throughout the day, I might have one or two client meetings, a 1-1 sync, or a coffee catch-up. On the days when we have new hires starting, I do a company onboarding for every single new team member. At the end of the work day, I head home for dinner and my daughter’s bedtime routine.

What has inspired you recently, outside of work?

I recently watched a documentary on Roger Federer, and it was really inspiring to see how he’s been so incredibly successful, yet so humble. I think there’s a myth, especially in Silicon Valley, that in order to be a successful executive, you have to be hard-charging and be this certain type of persona. Seeing someone like Roger, who’s so successful in his field, yet so grounded and humble, is testament that you can achieve greatness without being a psychopath.