• by Steve Ellwanger , July 22, 2019

Appy summer eating! Kraft Heinz has released a new AI-powered, meal-planning app that links to Instacarts, while TripAdvisor has tweaked its app with a Nearby feature that touts alternatives to top-ranked, hard-to-reserve restaurants from its ranks of destination experts.

Kraft Heinz’s Meal Hero app, developed by the company’s evolv group tech unit, already has some 43,000 users, according to Mani Gopalakrishnan, head of digital innovation at evolv group.

Meal Hero learns about users’ preferences to create tailor-made recipe and shopping recommendations based on preferred ingredients, diet, nutrition markers, retail availability and more. An interactive shopping list, automatically generated when meals are added to a user’s weekly plan, can be sent to Instacart through the app for home delivery.

“Home chefs, especially Gen Y and Millennials, are demanding integrated solutions that save both time and energy. Meal Hero fills that unmet need,” Gopalakrishnan tells Marketing Daily.

News of the Meal Hero app was first reported by Grocery Dive.

The app represents a form of hyper-personalization that allows brands to better match customer preferences based on known, active buying behaviors, according to Albert Thompson, managing director of digital at the Walton Isaacson agency.

“The idea is to better understand consumption interest during periods of discovery that can be leveraged to drive immediate purchase or can be reintroduced later at the point of sale,” says Thompson. “This is a distinctive advancement over basic personalization and programmatic methodologies in audience targeting.”

TripAdvisor is leveraging human intelligence from its destination experts to recommend alternatives to top restaurants that might prove difficult to book when traveling.

The recommendations are dynamic. For example, if it's noon, users will automatically be shown ideas for where to eat lunch.

“Destination experts are the backbone of the TripAdvisor community,” says Brian Hoyt, senior director of corporate communications at TripAdvisor. “Whether residents, locals or frequent visitors, they have up-to-date knowledge of what's going on in their destinations.”