From What’s for Dinner to Home Delivery in an Hour

A Silicon Valley startup is introducing a new offering that will facilitate meal planning, grocery shopping and delivery in a single click.

Introduced at Amazon’s Alexa Accelerator demo event last week, Anycart presents recipes, allows shoppers to acquire all of their ingredients from an online merchant with a single click and have those ingredients delivered or picked up at a store in as little as one hour. The offering could serve as a new alternative to meal-kit companies or restaurant deliveries and provide a seamless solution for the “What’s for dinner?” dilemma that so many retailers are working to solve.

“Anycart is for all of us who commute home from work every night wondering what to eat and what ingredients to buy,” Payman Nejati, CEO of the Mountain View, Calif.-based company, said in a presentation.

Anycart is a software that will work with any retailer offering home delivery or pickup, Nejati said. The company makes money in three ways: through a perorder fee to users; an affiliate fee to partner retailers; and from sponsored brands in the results. Anycart also has a voice-ordering skill on Amazon’s Alexa devices, which provides shopping capability through Amazon-owned Whole Foods Markets stores and Amazon’s Prime Delivery, Nejati said.

Earlier this year Walmart and Peapod separately announced programs for their shoppers to buys recipe ingredients online with a single click. Peapod’s offering is through a partnership with chef Mark Bittman; Walmart in partnership with Buzzfeed’s Tasty property.

Anycart was founded in 2016 behind an app that for the last 18 months has let users post and discover cooking videos. The company subsequently made a portion of those shoppable, Nejati explained.

Users of Anycart can click on recipes presented at the site and retrieve video instructions and a list of the ingredients to make them, along with options of how many servings they would like (shoppers can add or subtract ingredients from their cart as needed and can filter ingredients for certain diets and brand preferences). Anycart will then suggest additional recipes that can be assembled with any leftover ingredients from the first dish, a convenience Nejati said could help to reduce food waste and make shopping by the meal more economical.

Anycart can also assemble baskets from users’ own uploaded recipes or from other online recipe sources.

The company is now in beta mode. Customers can sign up at its website to join a wait list.