Allrecipes.ca places value on home cooks

Allrecipes.ca has named 30 of its more popular home cooks as brand ambassadors as part of a way to integrate brands into their recipes. “What we’ve done is selected a very highly engaged group of home cooks,” says Shannan LaMorre, vice-president, Olive Elite+ at Olive Media, Allrecipes’ sales arm in Canada. “By working with them we can work with brands to review, prepare and photograph some of their recipes.” The “Canadian All-stars” are “the extreme of engaged” and post, review, talk, blog and photograph more recipes than anybody else on the site, she says. They represent Allrecipes “to the nth degree.” LaMorre says a similar brand ambassador program on the American version of the site “has been very successful and several major CPG brands have come back several times.” The Canadian version of the program was tested in a trial run in which the brand ambassadors baked butter tarts. Ratings of butter tarts increased by 62% over the trial run’s three week period. “It goes to show you the value of these home cooks,” she says. “I think (the advertisers) are going to get a big lift in their performance.” The brand ambassadors are volunteers and will only receive branded products from sponsors for use in their recipes. LaMorre says Allrecipes is the number one food site in Canada. The English-language version of the site has just under 4 million unique visitors per month, according to Comscore numbers. Allrecipes is currently looking for a launch sponsor. “Typically, we’d like to do a recipe integration – that’s what the site’s about.” This article first appeared on MarketingMag.ca