Episode 819: How to Own the Full Reader Journey on Your Food Blog With Peter Sullivan

EBT819 – Peter Sullivan

Intro 00:00

Food bloggers. Hi, how are you today? Thank you so much for tuning in to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. This is the place for food bloggers to get information and inspiration to accelerate your blog’s growth, and ultimately help you to achieve your freedom. Whether that’s financial, personal, or professional. I’m Megan Porta. I have been a food blogger for 13 years, so I understand how isolating food blogging can be. I’m on a mission to motivate, inspire, and most importantly, let each and every food blogger, including you, know that you are heard and supported. 

[00:01] Megan Porta

Peter, welcome to the podcast. How are you today?

[00:04] Peter Sullivan

Thank you so much. I’m great, feeling rejuvenated from the long weekend.

[00:09] Megan Porta

Yeah, holiday weekend, right? Well, we’re super excited to chat today. AllSpice Labs is a new… what you’re calling a recipe operating system, or plugin for WordPress, that has been benefiting food bloggers’ businesses. We’re excited to learn all about that. Do you want to give us just a quick rundown on you and what AllSpice Labs does?

[00:34] Peter Sullivan

Yeah, absolutely. So if you haven’t heard of AllSpice Labs, or you have a little bit and you’re new to it — AllSpice Labs at its core is a food database that has all sorts of different ways to make more of your recipes. It’s powered by our proprietary ingredient database, so every single ingredient you can imagine, the different variations and connections of how they scale, how and when they expire, and all that. Built on top of that is a number of different experiences you can utilize through a WordPress plugin to power grocery lists, an AI agent, a pantry tracker, and advanced search capabilities to help provide great user experiences to your readers.

[01:25] Megan Porta

That all sounds amazing. I think we’re going to get into some visual stuff, so you’re going to share things we can see today, right? If you’re listening on the podcast, great — but when you have access to YouTube and can visually look, come join us there, because Peter’s going to show us some things you can’t access through a podcast. So, will you first start, Peter, by telling us — because not all of us are as techie-minded as I think you are — what does “recipe operating system” mean exactly?

[01:59] Peter Sullivan

Yeah, so it’s kind of a term I feel like we made up in some ways. The reason being, an operating system is something that can run or provide different ways to do something for a specific category. So if you think about iOS, like your iPhone — the iOS operating system is a system built specifically for Apple apps, Apple messaging, Apple camera, and all that. The AllSpice recipe operating system is a cloud operating system that’s specifically built for recipes and cooking. So if you think about all of the different things someone would do in a cooking or shopping experience — all the way from finding a recipe to building a grocery list, building a meal plan, even tracking their pantry — it’s a system that someone could just connect their website domain to, sync all of their recipes into this cloud recipe operating system, and from there it would be able to power all of those tricky algorithms that, for example, it sounds simple, but when you have combining multiple ingredients from multiple recipes into a single grocery list, scaling garlic becomes harder than you might expect in its different forms.

[03:32] Megan Porta

Yeah, wow. So it really is all-encompassing, and you’ve clearly thought this through. Have you been testing — I mean, how many sites is this on right now?

[03:43] Peter Sullivan

It’s on just under ninety-five. I don’t want to say — it was ninety-two last time I checked.

[03:46] Megan Porta

Wow, okay, that’s more than I was thinking. That’s great. And how are those going? Have you heard feedback that it’s helpful for the user, helpful for the blogger?

[03:58] Peter Sullivan

Yes, I would say the biggest benefit that people have self-reported has been engaged session time — engaged session time, by looking at their Google Analytics from the three months before adding AllSpice to the three months after adding AllSpice. Another thing we’ve been prioritizing right now is building out our own analytics system that you can log into through your AllSpice portal, and just understand all the different types of user interactions — not just how people are interacting with AllSpice on your site, but how we can create an encompassing analytics system. So we began to build that out, and we’re trying to deploy it to everyone soon in this new version of AllSpice. And then the last point we’ve noticed is we ran an A/B test across five sites — just under a million sessions. What the A/B test did was make it so AllSpice would show up 50% of the time. So half of the users that go to a site are going to see AllSpice buttons and be able to interact with AllSpice on the site; the other 50% it’s not there — it’s just how the site was beforehand. What this allowed us to do was have a much more grounded analysis while removing some of the other variables, because if you run an A/B test comparing before AllSpice to after AllSpice, there are just so many different variables that could go into play — Google changing an algorithm and affecting traffic, or so many other things. So we found this could be the best way — it’s either there or it’s not there during the exact same time frame. Those study results are on our website: it was an average increase of 28.5%, or 28.3%, in engaged session time, and then an increase in seven-day return rate by six percent — meaning people are six percent more likely to return after interacting with AllSpice. We’re trying to go deeper into these numbers and really understand what that means, but yeah.

[06:01] Megan Porta

Wow, okay. That’s cool — yeah, those are definitely good numbers. So before we get into it, because I want to ask you some more nitty-gritty details — you guys have an offer you’re offering to Eat Blog Talk listeners. Do you want to mention that right now?

[06:28] Peter Sullivan

Yes — so if you sign up in September, before the fall chaos with all the traffic hits, we’re doing a one-month free trial. We’ll help you get set up and implemented on your site, and then you have a free trial where you can try it out, see what you think — and if you don’t like it by the end, you can deactivate the plugin, or if you do, you can keep using it.

[06:54] Megan Porta

Amazing, thank you for that — and we’ll put the details for that on your show notes page, so you can go check those out there. Okay, so let’s talk about the — I’ll call it a plugin, or recipe operating system — let’s talk about AllSpice Labs and how to get it on your site, if people are interested. Let’s just start there.

[07:16] Peter Sullivan

Yeah, so our website is allspicelabs.com. You can create an account, and it’s a couple-step process — we’ve actually simplified it a lot in the past six months. You log in, and you’ll see a little place that says “Integrate,” and you paste your website domain, and then you click “Sync and Verify.” You’ll get a DNS record where you just have to go into your host provider, your DNS host, just to prove that you own the domain. From there, it’s going to take about an hour to sync all of your recipes into the recipe operating system — and what’s happening in that process is we’re actually matching every single ingredient on your site to our ingredient database, so the system understands what each ingredient is, and people can build out grocery lists, track their pantry, and do different things across that cooking lifecycle. Then the last step is just the WordPress plugin — your classic install of a zip file, so that’s in the portal: download that, upload it, and then in the WordPress settings there are just a couple of settings you can choose. The settings are just like a little floating experience on the bottom right side for desktop, and then for mobile — which it’s primarily been optimized for, given the traffic ratio — it’s inline or floating. I’d definitely recommend inline. What that means is the full experience is just right above your recipe card, so as you’re scrolling down, a user might see a little side button that says “build a grocery list,” “jump to recipe,” or “ask a question.” Rather than it being an overlay over the recipe card or your site, it’s just an inline block that is interactive.

[09:15] Megan Porta

Got it, okay. Okay, cool — so that’s kind of how to get it on if you want to test it out. Now, once it’s on, what should we keep at the top of our minds? And please feel free — if you want to share your screen now, I don’t know when an appropriate time to do that is — but yeah, just kind of wondering where to go once we have it.

[09:39] Peter Sullivan

Yeah, I will share my screen.

[09:41] Megan Porta

Okay, perfect.

[09:50] Peter Sullivan

Okay. Can you see my screen?

[09:56] Megan Porta

Yes, I can.

[09:58] Peter Sullivan

Okay, great — I’ll just do a quick end-to-end showcase. So the first is search, and search can be set up as an overlay — kind of like your Slickstream or Grow search that people have traditionally used. It could also just be a dedicated page integrated into your site, so it doesn’t have to be an overlay.

[10:27] Peter Sullivan

And the cool thing about the recipe operating system is that we utilize all the tags you’ve already added to your recipes, but then we’re analyzing the recipes at a deeper level with our ingredient database — and we’re also creating our own buckets. So say someone has a thousand recipes on your site, we might create thirty buckets, or categories, and those are designed to be options — groups of recipes someone could click on to find recipes. And then we analyze the click-through rate of which buckets are performing well, and we’ll keep the ones that are doing well and swap out the ones that aren’t. So the search is your typical search — search and save, people can save recipes — but then we have this advanced search that has that traditional search, like I just search “chicken” right here, and it’ll show some chicken options. But it’s also an AI search — so it’ll say “savory egg bakes” and “cheesy muffins.” A user could also describe what they’re in the mood for if they’re not sure what they want to make, and it expands the options to give a lot more. So that’s how the search works.

[11:45] Megan Porta

Can I ask you a quick question — can you use this in tandem with Slickstream, or is it one or the other?

[11:54] Peter Sullivan

Yeah, you could — it’s just, there would no longer really be a need, because it provides the same functionality and more. It has search and save, and in addition, it has that advanced AI search.

[12:01] Megan Porta

Yeah, got it, okay.

[12:17] Peter Sullivan

So then, when you get to a page, you’ll see this little side button that says “jump to recipe,” and as you scroll down the page, it’ll say “ask me anything.” So if you click on “ask me anything” — what we’re doing, when we bring the blog into the recipe operating system, is we’re pulling the full body, we’re pulling the recipe card, and we’re also pulling all of the comments. This allows us to truly ground the answers in your blog, rather than just a general AI. So, as you can see here, I’m going to just ask it a contextual question that makes sense. So then the user, rather than having to go through the entire blog or all of the comments, can ask a question. The goal here is that rather than a user going through this, copying and pasting the URL, and going to ChatGPT to ask a question — and then you lose the session, the cooking session — it just gives them that right on the site, so they don’t have to bounce for that reason.

[13:35] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[13:45] Peter Sullivan

And as you can see here, it’s going to ground the answer and say it found this on the page. So the answer it gave was based on an answer that came from either the comments or somewhere in the blog. The comments would be the response from the publisher — so in this case, Gina’s response to someone’s comment about a good substitution.

[14:05] Megan Porta

Okay, wow, that’s really cool that it goes through the comments too. So — I imagine this keeps people from leaving, but does it also affect ad revenue? Because people aren’t scrolling as much just to find answers.

[14:23] Peter Sullivan

Yeah, I mean — if someone leaves the site, then you lose all your ad revenue. It’d be really cool — I know Mediavine mentioned they were looking into building an API to allow people to do different things and analyze the ads. That’d be one of the most helpful things. If we could just get some parameters associated with how they measure RPMs, and how they measure revenue — because engaged session time is increasing, but it’d be awesome if there was a way to tie that directly to revenue. But there’s no way to do it. We have all these data points — engaged session time, seven-day return rate — but there’s no public way from the ad providers to have a direct association to run an analysis.

[14:27] Megan Porta

Yeah, right — then they’re gone. Yeah.

[15:16] Megan Porta

Okay. Yeah, just a thought I had. And then on mobile — how much of the screen does that little box take up? Does it pop up on the entire screen?

[15:31] Peter Sullivan

Yeah, so it goes above the recipe card. Let me actually see if I can share my screen in a mobile format, so it would be consolidated and wouldn’t be hovering anymore. If you see how this is kind of hovering on the side, it would just be inline.

[15:51] Peter Sullivan

Let me see… it’s not going to work — well, unfortunately it’s not picking it up as an iPhone. But it would look similar to this; it just wouldn’t be covering the page, it would be right above the recipe card. It would be this same type of experience — say I click “build a grocery list”… wait, it did it, I guess it decided to change. So if you see right here, I’m scrolling right now, I’m on the recipe card, and then—

[16:32] Peter Sullivan

—there’s the recipe card, but this little button that minimizes itself. If you hover over it, it’s going to say “build a grocery list.” So if you click that, it’ll bring you right here, and you’ll have this little button that says “shop.” So then I could add this recipe, and now the user would have a checkable grocery list, categorized by aisle. And also, the cool thing — if you add multiple recipes to a single grocery list, say three recipes had basil, you could have a drop-down and it would show you which recipes call for how much basil, and it would auto-combine the ingredients.

[17:04] Megan Porta

Okay, that’s cool. That’s super cool.

[17:25] Peter Sullivan

Another goal of making more out of your recipes by putting them into a recipe operating system — there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to get session time from someone who’s built a grocery list from your page. So if you could get a session time of someone spending twenty minutes walking through the grocery store, checking off while you’re showing them a couple of ads — that’s something that hasn’t really been there before.

[17:57] Megan Porta

Right, right. Yeah, that makes sense. So — where does the user go to find this? Where does the grocery list get saved? Where do they go back to find it once they’re in the store?

[18:10] Peter Sullivan

Yeah, so they’d just click the “shop” button on the grocery list, and then they could rename it — so next time they come back to your site, they could say, like, “my go-to list.”

[18:14] Megan Porta

Okay.

[18:28] Peter Sullivan

And then they’d have a saved grocery list. So this was the first one, but now they could have this “go-to list,” where — if they wanted to use this as just a pure grocery list, it doesn’t even have to be something they use where they add recipes from. They could just say “ground beef, white rice, peppers,” and “we’ll go with black beans,” and add that.

[18:47] Megan Porta

Okay.

[19:02] Peter Sullivan

And then they’ve got that list. They could go and add additional ingredients to it from a recipe, or just from scratch. And then you can print this, you can share this.

[19:15] Megan Porta

Wow. Okay, that’s kind of what I was curious about — yeah, can you send it to your phone or something? Like, so it’s not just housed on the site. But I think you just answered that.

[19:25] Peter Sullivan

Yes. And a little cool feature I like is you can share the grocery list, so it could be a collaborative grocery list for people in your household, if you wanted to.

[19:40] Megan Porta

Nice, okay, very cool, that’s awesome. Okay, so that’s kind of the shopping portion. I know there are some other features, like meal planning — are those things you’d be able to share right now?

[19:57] Peter Sullivan

Yeah, for sure. So in this same experience right here, just above the recipe card, a user could go and create their own meal plan. Or, in the AllSpice portal, you could create a meal plan through an AI agent that would leverage our ingredient database to help you build out meal plans for your readers — that you could then sell. You could do it as a subscription, you could do it as a one-time fee, or you could just do it for free — just offering, say, “you need to put in your email for this meal plan, and we’ll send you an email of the meal plan to help build out your list.” But here’s what it looks like — I could just say quick plan, do a three-day meal plan, and then create a plan. So then a user could go and search and find recipes on your site, and it would auto-handle the grocery list for the user.

[20:58] Megan Porta

Wow, okay.

[21:02] Peter Sullivan

And then, that would be the meal plan. But I’ll go and share with you — let me just jump into the portal real quick, because I think this is where it’s really valuable. Some positive feedback we’ve gotten is about how long it used to take to build a meal plan. With this AllSpice system, it’s extremely quick — pretty much all you have to do is create a new plan, name it, and — I’ll take this one, because I already started building it. You go down into the days, so you have day by day, but you could also click “fill this plan with AI.” Don’t worry, it’s not creating AI-generated recipes — this is really just a survey put together by AI that’s going to ask you a number of questions, and then it will go through all of your recipes and put them together into a meal plan. So you could say, “I want overlapping ingredients of chicken and garlic, and the ingredients can’t expire over seven days.” Those are the type of things the ingredient database would be able to help you with. So rather than going through all of your recipes, it would just have this information, and you could build a plan in two minutes to then publish to your readers.

[22:27] Megan Porta

Wow, that’s so crazy. You’re right — I think the hang-up about meal plans is that people have had to build them themselves, like, remembering what they have and what goes together. So this is kind of mind-blowing.

[22:43] Peter Sullivan

Yeah, it takes forever — it literally takes forever. I think that’s a similar thing we’ve heard demand for, like an ebook generator — something we’re building that we’ll release. Same kind of survey-type process, and then it will auto-generate you an ebook.

[22:55] Megan Porta

Ooh, yeah.

[23:02] Megan Porta

Wow, that’s so cool, I love it. What have you heard from the ninety-five or whatever people that have been using it? What features are most popular — are users mostly using the meal plan, or the grocery list, or all of it?

[23:19] Peter Sullivan

I would say this meal planning, on their end — not even the users, just being able to build a meal plan to publish — has been the most “wow, this is so helpful and quick” from a time-saving perspective. The other piece I’d say is search — the advanced AI search — people have found to be very helpful. We’ve had a number of people come to us saying they want to use AllSpice just for the search, so we’ve actually thought about maybe spinning that off as its own thing, if someone just wants the search capabilities. And then there are two more pieces. The third would be grocery lists — the ability to have checkable lists that auto-combine. For example, if you see here, we’ve got two recipes that contain basil, two recipes that contain garlic, so it auto-combines them into the grocery list, and you can clearly see how much each recipe calls for. And then the last piece — which is newer, and came from a request from a few people saying “I’m not sure I want to use this until you offer this” — initially we had built this out so a user or reader can create one account, and then they can just log into that AllSpice account on any site they go to that’s utilizing AllSpice. We found that a number of people — primarily larger sites with a really great brand — want it fully white-labeled, end to end. They don’t want the AllSpice logo anywhere; they want it to be like you can’t even tell, just their own full system on their site — no confusion of a different account. And they want to really own the user data. If you think about tools like Slickstream or Grow, they own that user account — they pass back the user’s name and email, which we’ve been doing as well — but people wanted to take it to the next level of owning their audience. So what we just opened up and offered is ecosystems and memberships. This means you truly own the account and the account relationship — the name, the email, the full account. Someone creates an account in your ecosystem, and that account won’t work on someone else’s site that’s using AllSpice. It’s truly just for your site. Some of the benefit of that is a few things: I think there’s a balance — it might be good for some people, it might not be good for others. Some people might want to be in a larger ecosystem with other sites utilizing AllSpice, but if you have a really big site, there’s benefit in owning the user data, because of things you can do like expanding your own IP. Owning your audience really means owning the name and the email address.

[26:22] Megan Porta

Mm-hmm. Yep.

[26:43] Peter Sullivan

So you can own that algorithm to drive traffic through email. What this now allows you to do is pick up all sorts of different data points. So if you want to use AllSpice to survey your users or collect different behavior information, you could create targeting campaigns based on very specific parameters, while also building out IP and data ownership for your site. I think the direction things are going, IP will be extremely important to own — and if you have a site where you own your domain, you own everything, having a system where you can expand and grow some of that data IP could be good.

[27:29] Megan Porta

Wow, okay. So it sounds like you’re gathering feedback and really listening to what people need — you’re not just throwing stuff out there. But that’s really, really cool, and I think you’re right, different sites or different brands are going to need different things in that regard. So cool. Is there anything else here you want to show while we have your screen up?

[27:53] Peter Sullivan

Yeah, I’ll show one last thing. I think the key thing is there’s a lot of concern around AI — people don’t want an AI that’s going to hallucinate on their site. So something you can do is actually see how your recipes live in the recipe operating system. If you click on one of your recipes in AllSpice, you can add and see the context that the AI has. So say you have something that’s not written publicly in your blog, but you want to add some information on the back end around substitution or storage — you could add that information for the AI to reference, and you’re also going to be able to see what it’s referencing based on what’s in your blog. You’re also going to be able to see how everything’s broken down, from ingredients to instructions. And I’d say that’s it — the last piece is, if you do want to monetize meal plans and things like that, you can just connect your Stripe account, and it’s done through that.

[28:55] Megan Porta

What? That’s so cool. I mean, that right there has been another hang-up for food bloggers, just figuring that piece out. So cool. Okay — is there anything we haven’t mentioned as far as blogger benefits, user benefits? Just want to make sure we cover all the juicy stuff.

[29:20] Peter Sullivan

No, I feel like that’s mostly it. I think a lot of this has just been built around feedback — but not just feedback from publishers. We did a few consumer studies too, understanding how people interact with recipe blogs, and where things are transitioning. So we’ve factored a lot of that information into building this.

[29:45] Megan Porta

That’s great — so you’re not just throwing up stuff, you’re actually putting research and intention into this, which matters to us. We really do appreciate that. Okay, so people go the route you mentioned earlier in the episode and get it on their sites — you have the offer you mentioned as well — and just start playing around and seeing how it’s received, I guess. Do you anticipate — are people giving feedback pretty consistently? Are users giving feedback to the bloggers?

[30:31] Peter Sullivan

Yeah, there’s some, but there hasn’t been much — which feels like a good thing, because we’re seeing a lot of usage. But there hasn’t really been commentary from users, which I feel like — people are quiet when they’re happy, and when they’re annoyed, they’ll let you know.

[30:57] Megan Porta

Yeah, that’s true — they get loud, yep.

[31:01] Peter Sullivan

Yeah, for sure — especially with people who cook from home. Someone will make something, replace an ingredient, and be like, “this was terrible, I shouldn’t have done it this way” — well, that wasn’t the recipe. So I feel like people aren’t shy to speak up, but no, there hasn’t been much coming from the actual users — just high usage. I’ll leave it at that.

[31:29] Megan Porta

Good. And then, how did you guys decide to create this? Are you bloggers yourselves? Are you home cooks? What inspired this?

[31:41] Peter Sullivan

It’s a combination of efforts, I’d say. Brandon and Will are my two business partners — Brandon is our CEO, Will is our chief technology officer. About three and a half years ago, Brandon and Will had both built a video game called Global Strike that went viral and did really well, and then they wanted to build something in the cooking space. Brandon loved to cook, and Will was like, “I feel like I never know what I have in my pantry when I go to the grocery store” — he was like, “what if we could build an ingredient database that could do all sorts of different things just to make life easier?” So that’s actually how it started. Then we started talking to different publishers — Andrew Wilder at NerdPress was actually one of the first people we talked to, and he advised us on a bunch of things. And then it kind of just compounded — there was no shortage of people reaching out to provide feedback, or things that felt like they’d been changing or been painful, so we’ve just been building around that.

[32:49] Megan Porta

Nice — yeah, it’s a huge industry, right? I’m sure you’ve been able to gather a lot of feedback and ways to improve. So that’s great. Well, thank you — is there anything else we should know before we start saying goodbye, Peter?

[32:59] Peter Sullivan

Yeah — this has been fun. I think that’s it for the most part. If you want to try it out, go to allspicelabs.com and get started with a completely free trial. We’ll help you out — if you don’t like it, no harm, no foul. And if you do, we’re always receptive to feedback, and there’s a lot of things we can build around this. So don’t hesitate to reach out, even with ideas.

[33:29] Megan Porta

Thank you for your time, for showing this, and for the amazing tool and opportunity for food bloggers to simplify and expand their brands and help out the user — there are so many problems being solved, I can see, through this plugin. So thank you, and thanks for your time today, we appreciate it, Peter.

[33:50] Peter Sullivan

Yeah, thank you — always a pleasure.

[33:53] Megan Porta

All right, we’ll talk to you soon, and thanks, food bloggers, for listening. We’ll see you next time.