Skip to main content

Whole Foods’ Messenger chatbot lets you discover recipes using emojis

whole-foods
What to do with food emojis? That age-old question humans have grappled with since the dawn of the iPhone. In terms of our everyday cellular discourse, is there any use for them other than to express our appetite or sexual urges?

Whole Foods thinks it has the answer with its new chatbot for Facebook Messenger that lets you incorporate emojis into your quest to discover tantalizing, and healthy, new recipes.

Related Videos

All you have to do to interact with the culinary AI is seek out Whole Foods on Facebook and begin a Messenger conversation, or search for the company on Messenger itself.

The bot initiates the chat by explaining that it can “help you find some delicious recipes.” There’s no mention of emojis when you start, but don’t resort to boring old text. Take our word for it, you can break out those little icons to your heart’s content.

For example, if you were to enter everyone’s favorite food emoji (after the eggplant, and peach icon, ahem) the taco, the bot would hit you back with a slideshow of links to — yes, you guessed it — taco recipes. All the links navigate to the Whole Foods website, where you can also add the items you need to a shopping list if you have an account.

Whole Foods claims that you can add text to modify recipes in accordance with any special diets you may have, seeing as there’s no emoji for “vegan,” unless you get really creative. Therefore, maybe it’s best not to ditch text altogether just yet — even if Facebook itself thinks you inevitably will at some point in the not too distant future. Unless, of course, like us, your diet consists of just pizza, and hot dogs — foods that can be expressed purely through emojis.

Whole Foods envisions the chatbot as a tool to enhance your in-store shopping experience. “Our goal is to make recipe discovery easy and to help our customers … find new ways to experience the foods they love,” Jeff Jenkins, global executive, digital strategy and marketing at Whole Foods Market, told VentureBeat. “Whole Foods Market customers are always looking for inspiration no matter whether they are at home, on the run or walking down our aisles.”

If, however, you prefer to spend your days on your couch playing video games, there’s always the Pizza Hut chatbot instead.

Editors' Recommendations

Having trouble accessing your Instagram account? You’re not alone
Instagram being used on an iPhone.

Instagram appears to be down right now, but the glitch many users are reporting is an odd one. It's not just that users are having trouble accessing the popular photo- and video-sharing app, but they're also having trouble accessing their own accounts and have reported being hit with account suspension notices.

On Monday morning, the apparent Instagram outage was reported by users on Twitter and on Downdetector. Both sites included numerous reports saying that users suddenly lost access to their IG accounts and were given account suspension notices.

Read more
YouTube brings pinch to zoom and video navigation changes to everyone
The red and white YouTube logo on a phone screen. The phone is on a white background.

YouTube is updating its user interface with a slew of changes, and chief among them are the pinch-to-zoom feature and "precise" video navigation.

On Monday, YouTube announced quite a few updates to its viewing experience on mobile and web. Notably, the video-sharing platform said that it was finally "launching pinch to zoom and precise seeking to all users starting today."

Read more
Instagram’s expanded blocking lets you block a person’s backup accounts
Two mobile screenshots Instagram's expanded blocking feature.

Instagram has announced a number of new safety feature updates to its photo and video sharing app, including an expansion of its existing blocking feature.

On Thursday, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri tweeted a video in which he introduced the new safety updates to IG. Of the three new "updated safety tools" Mosseri announced, the expansion of IG's blocking feature was particularly notable.

Read more