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Creating a recipe for a valuable Samsung subscription offering

Context

Whisk was a B2B recipe & grocery platform when it was acquired by Samsung in 2019.

I joined the Samsung NEXT product innovation team early 2021 – but as part of an organizational change, was immediately assigned to join Whisk as their first researcher. Under new leadership, the directive for Whisk was to become a consumer app and grow its user base as rapidly as possible.

Over the following year, I led research on various projects while Whisk pursued a strategy of becoming a vertical social network – a “Strava for cooking”. (There was also a short-lived integration with TikTok.) During this time, I established a practice that included partnerships with new tools like Dovetail, Maze, and Rally, allowing Whisk to make better decisions at scale.

Eventually, the call from Samsung leadership was that it was time to start making money as a consumer app.

The question I was handed:

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Assuming we monetize via subscriptions, what would a “Whisk Premium” look like?

Approach

I planned to answer this question using the “double diamond” method – with a particular focus on the first two phases.

The business question was so large and broad that it wouldn’t be answered with one specific research method or tool.

Phase 1 – “Explore the problem”

We knew a lot about what people thought of our app, but we hadn’t done any research to understand the larger opportunity space that Whisk could play in.

I set out to conduct some wide-ranging interviews with non-users to learn more about their experiences, and challenges.

The topics covered the whole “journey” (it’s nonlinear!) of at-home cooking.

I used a custom recruitment screeners to select a diverse group of participants. Diversity included traditional demographics as well as cooking-related factors, such as allergies, cooking experience, and health goals. The goal here was getting a breadth of relevant experiences.

After conducting more than 20 interviews, I told the stories of participants through four different themes: Health & Nutrition, Substitutions, Education, and Reducing Waste.

These themes became the backbone of future concepts.

Phase 2 – “Decide what to fix”

After exploring the wide landscape of opportunities, I designed a set of surveys to quantify what we learned in the interviews. One survey went out to Whisk users by email, the other to non-users via a third-party vendor.

The surveys were meant to answer the following question:

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“Who has what beliefs/problems (and to what extent)?”

This chart, for example, answers the question: “For people who follow a specific eating regimen (eg. vegetarian), what are the most important things about a recipe?”

In addition, we used the survey as an opportunity to test some initial concepts for premium features. Based on the discovery interviews, I had highlighted four thematic opportunities: Health & Nutrition, Substitutions, Education, and Reducing Waste.

In the survey, we asked respondents to rank different ideas that represented a combination of these themes. For example, “a feature that recommends ingredient substitutions to make a recipe healthier.”

Results & Reflections

I left Whisk shortly after this project, while the company was rebranded to Samsung Food.

While I wasn’t involved in the final details of the subscription program, my research provided the company with a clear vision of what to build.

If I had to do it again – knowing that I was going to leave – I might have leaned more into the concept testing instead of optimizing for a comprehensive set of surveys. It unfortunately took several weeks to get the surveys out the door, and that time could have been spent putting together prototypes and fleshing out concepts to accelerate the development process.

If I did the project over again, I might have tried to “combine” these two steps in the Double Diamond.

While this would have sacrificed some “rigor”, it would have given the Product & Design teams a head start on a research-driven development process 🙂