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Project Overview

myfoodbook is Australia's first food media website that allows a network of passionate home cooks to collect favorite recipes from top chefs, cooking & food brands into a fully personalised cookbook. Following an enthusiastic adoption of the concept by consumers, myfoodbook quickly sought to replicate and enhance the “cookbook” experience using the iPad, the number one device in the kitchen.

Organisation

myfoodbook

Team

Project Team:
Oomph, Sydney
Commercial Director: Zachary King
Creative Director: Erica Van Der Walt
Art Director: Leigh-Ann Thomas
Project Manager: James Young

Project Brief

The myfoodbook cookbook concept of promoting branded recipe content to create personalised cookbooks launched in August 2012. The new food media channel offers professional cooking brands a vehicle to promote their recipes to passionate home cooks in a new and unique format.

Offering ongoing inspiration to a 60,000+ subscribed community, myfoodbook uses social media and direct marketing tactics to keep subscribers engaged with recipes and products during key meal occasions.

Early on, mini PDF cookbooks were also designed to promote seasonal cooking using content from a mix of complimentary Partner recipes. The popularity of these cookbooks led to the expedition of an online "library" experience to enhance the value for both consumers and our Recipe Partners.

As part of the brief, the content and experience had to reflect the brand identity of myfoodbook, in a completely tablet native manner.

Phase 1 was to provide access to a series of collated recipe collections, which were grouped by themes.

Phase 2 was full integration with the website including the ability to dynamically create bespoke recipe books, for Recipe Partner collections.

Project Need

The myfoodbook: MyCollections app launched in May 2013 offering a completely tailored experience for the tablet channel.

In addition to delivery the recipe content, complete with gorgeous high resolution imagery, step by step instructions as well as a complete layer of advanced functionality including: hands free voice activated cooking mode (triggered by rotating iPad), dynamic search capability, curation of favorites collections, social media sharing and integration, email sharing, recipe timer, integration with the website, note taking and more.

This project also gave the Oomph Design Studio the opportunity to further develop an automated workflow process for content production. The technical minds of the development team and the creative minds of the design team came together to produce a great end product! Making use of templated design layouts for the books Oomph used scripting to take the recipe content directly from the myfoodbook website and feed it into the design structure for the app.

User Experience

Users of our iPad cookbooks have enjoyed the complete cookbook experience that is replicated on the tablet environment with enhanced features.

The myfoodbook: MyCollections app not only provides access to the beautiful myfoodbook Partner recipe collection content, but does so with a layer of functionality that has created a genuine utility product for users that is not available through other channels.

Users can bookmark their favourite content, search for recipes using key words, share recipes with their friends either via email or social media, make notes directly onto the recipe page, visit the relevant page on the myfoodbook website with one touch.

One of the key functionality is the inclusion of cooking mode. By rotating the iPad into landscape mode, integration with the acceleromaters causes the App to switch to cooking mode which includes easily read, step by step instructions for the recipe. Moving to the next step can even be controlled simply by saying ‘forward’ or ‘backward’. As well as voice control, also included in cooking mode are the customisable cooking timer and alarm, as well as one touch ingredients list and next step preview, so that the App takes the cookbook concept to completely new heights.

The myfoodbook: Collections App has also been designed to ensure easy, intuitive navigation all the while remaining consistent with the myfoodbook brand principles of gorgeous imagery, clean structure and simplicity.

Project Marketing

The MyCollections cookbook App has quickly grown into a library of six unique cookbooks in less than three months. The bookshelf includes a mix of Seasonal cooking books such as Mother's Day, Winter Warmers and Dessert Lovers along with a series of Complete Collections from our Recipe Partners including Kikkoman Kitchens, Australian Mushroom Growers and Cadbury Kitchen.

Each book launch is supported by a fully integrated promotion campaign comprising direct and social media marketing which to date has resulted in almost 10,000 cookbook downloads.

Embraced by the myfoodbook Partner network, the library will grow to more than 15 cookbooks before the end of the year.

The myfoodbook collections App is an integral part of the multi-channel offering to the community and is a unique addition to the recipe and cook book publishing genre. With continued iterations and development planned, the App will continue to push the boundaries of innovation in cookbooks and the marketing of branded content.