Most food retailers already own the highest-intent page on their website, and most of them treat it as a brand exercise.
Recipes get filed under content marketing. They earn traffic, they earn newsletter signups, they photograph well, and they sit two clicks away from anything you can buy. Somebody reads how to make asparagus risotto, closes the tab, and goes to a supermarket.
Intent-Attached Versus Catalogue-Attached Merchandising
There is a useful distinction hiding in most recommendation strategies.
Catalogue-attached merchandising fires wherever a product exists. “Customers also bought” on a product page is the canonical example — it appears because the product appears, with no knowledge of why the visitor is there. It works, modestly, in the way that a well-tuned average works.
Intent-attached merchandising fires where the visitor has already declared a plan. It is a different quality of signal, and it is rarer than it should be because it requires you to know something specific about the moment rather than the item.
A recipe is the strongest declaration of intent a food retailer ever receives. Someone reading a method has told you what they are cooking, roughly when, for approximately how many people, and — implicitly — that they intend to acquire eight to twelve specific things in the near future. There is no segment in your CRM that comes close to that.
A “customers also bought” carousel guesses. A recipe page has already been told.
The published effect of closing that gap is substantial. Third-party benchmarks put shoppable recipe content at roughly a 30% increase in average basket size, with customers adding about three more items than those shopping without recipe context. That is market data rather than any single project’s result, but the mechanism is not mysterious: you removed a search step from a decision that had already been made.
What We Built on Gutta på Haugen
Gutta på Haugen is a specialty food shop in Oslo, trading since 1994, with several branches and national shipping. When we picked the project up, its website was a form and a phone call — the broader story of that rebuild is in the counter problem.
They already had a recipes page with an existing audience. It sat apart from the shop: read the method, then go and find the ingredients yourself.
The redesign mirrors the ingredient list on the right with a pinned panel of real product cards on the left, each with its own Add to Cart, plus an add-everything action beneath them. Below that sit Popular Recipes and Customers Also Bought, so the page has somewhere to send you next.
This was our proposal rather than a client request, and the reasoning was not elaborate:
“They had an existing page for recipes. Knowing that users would buy the ingredients for the recipe, having the products there would increase basket size.” — Designer, Kilowott
The argument is about a gap that already existed. The intent was there. The audience was there. The products were there. The only thing standing between reading and buying was a search step, performed manually, once per ingredient, by someone holding a phone in a kitchen.
On evidence. The client loved the idea and reports that a lot of purchases come through that flow. That is client-reported, not measured — no attach rate, no basket-size delta, no analytics we can hand you. We label it that way in the whitepaper too, and it sits deliberately outside the figures on the results page. A directional signal from the client is worth something. It is not worth pretending it is a number.
Five Things That Decide Whether This Works
Shoppable recipes are easy to describe and easy to implement badly. The failure modes are consistent.
Real product cards, not links. A link to a product page restarts the journey: load, read, choose a variant, add, navigate back, find your place in the ingredient list. A card with its own Add to Cart keeps the reader on the page they came for. The difference in completion between those two patterns is not marginal.
Add everything, prominently. The single most valuable control on the page is the one that adds the full ingredient list at once. It is also the one most often buried below the fold, because it looks like a utility rather than a conversion element. It is a conversion element.
Handle what people already own. Nobody needs your olive oil, salt and pepper. A recipe that insists on adding eleven items when the shopper wants four reads as unhelpful, and unhelpful is expensive on a page whose entire premise is convenience. Let items be deselected without making it a chore.
Substitute honestly when stock fails. A recipe page is a promise that the meal is achievable. If two ingredients are out of stock, saying so — with a substitution — protects the promise. Silently dropping them from the panel breaks it in the kitchen, hours later, which is the worst possible place to discover it.
Match quantities to pack sizes. “300g of parmesan” against a 200g wheel is a decision you are making the customer perform. Doing that arithmetic for them, per recipe, is unglamorous data work and it is where a lot of the basket lift actually comes from.
Where Else Intent Already Exists
Once you start looking for declared intent rather than inferred interest, a handful of other surfaces appear in most retailers’ sites:
- Gift occasions. “Christmas hamper” is a plan with a date, a budget and a recipient attached.
- Repeat orders. Somebody buying the same thing every month has declared a plan that repeats — which is the argument in solve replenishment before you chase new customers.
- Catering and events. A quantity and a date, stated up front.
- Support and FAQ pages. People arrive there having declared a problem, and most retailers merchandise nothing at all against it.
The pattern is the same each time. Find the page where the customer has told you what they are trying to do, and make that page transactable. It usually already exists, usually gets decent traffic, and usually reports into a team with no revenue target.
Worth noting that this is the one place where a deliberately restrained storefront should get denser. On a brand built around empty space and one heading per section — the argument in why a gourmet store should look nothing like a supermarket — the recipe page is where the density is earned, because the visitor has already declared what they came to do.
The Awkward Recommendation
If you run a food or CPG store, look at your recipe traffic and your recipe revenue. Most sites can produce the first number instantly and cannot produce the second at all, because nothing on those pages was ever instrumented as commerce. That absence is itself the finding — and it is the same measurement gap we describe in measure the process you are about to delete.
Then ask the related question from ask what they phoned up about: when customers asked your staff “what goes with this,” what did the staff say? That answer is a merchandising strategy that already works, sitting in somebody’s head, waiting to be a panel.
