Shopping cart-mounted tablet detects nearby items and offers recipes in real time

Hellmann's Recipe Cart campaign used NFC technology to immediately suggest meal ideas to shoppers as they walked past other ingredients. Sales rose by almost 70 percent.

Regular readers of Springwise may remember the Hellmann’s mayonnaise campaign in Brazil that printed recipes for those who purchased the mayonnaise, using the other items also being bought as ingredients. Unsatisfied with stopping there, the company has returned with the Recipe Cart, which uses NFC technology to immediately suggest meal ideas to shoppers as they walk past other ingredients. The campaign was the brainchild of digital agency CUBOCC, who fitted shopping carts at the Pão de Açúcar shopping center in São Paulo with touchscreen devices. When consumers placed a jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise in their cart, the tablet detected where they were in the store through NFC tags located on each aisle. For example, if they walked past the vegetable section, a video of a summer salad with mayonnaise began to play on the screen, while those next to the fish were recommended a fish, onion and mayonnaise bake. If they liked the recipe they could interact with the display to find the location of the necessary ingredients in store, or share the meal idea with friends over social networks. Some 45,000 customers were involved in the campaign and – according to Hellmann’s – sales rose by almost 70 percent. The video below shows the Recipe Cart in action: Although the campaign lasted only one month and focused on one specific product, could this idea be expanded to include a wide database of recipes targeting multiple consumer groups, given its apparent success?