How Blinkit is building recipes using AI

“Aaj kya khaana hai?" This question is probably asked in most Indian households every morning. Blinkit may have found an answer to this question.

A small team of engineers at Blinkit recently came up with 'Recipe Rover', a ChatGPT and Midjourney-powered engine that will help to suggest recipes and find ingredients.

In the brand's blogpost, Vaibhav Bhutani, AI product lead, Blinkit, shares, "We wanted to make instant recipes as good a feature as instant delivery. Not only that, we only wanted to show you recipes we know you will be able to make right away (because we have all the ingredients available). But creating this convenience was time-consuming to build. It took us 3-4 hours to build just one recipe page."

"We were also limited by our understanding of cuisine and event-specific recipes. Regional and festival-specific recipes were an even bigger problem. Over time, there were multiple missed opportunities for us, due to the high lead time and lack of context. To solve this, we introduced the AI Recipe Rover."

Recipe Rover is now available to all Blinkit customers. But how will this new feature help consumers?

It will help in the following ways:

Meal planning simplified: There's a range of simple recipes, with ingredients, that can be quickly delivered - all in a few clicks.

Occasion-based curation: If it's the Mango season, one can head to the mango recipe corner. For Ganesh Utsav, one can make 'modaks' at home.

Nutritional value: Each recipe will have information about the macro-nutrients that the meal contains.

Recipe Rover will help Blinkit to generate thousands of recipes in a couple of hours. It will enable the brand to cover a range of recipes in the context of ingredients, events and festivals, at the push of a button.

In the blogpost, Bhutani also mentions that the brand wants more than just well-written scripts.

"With the help of Stable Diffusion 1.5 and Midjourney techniques, we crafted visually appealing images for each recipe, perfectly complementing the AI-generated text and offering a glimpse of the final dish. These visuals not only elevated the overall presentation, but also helped capture the attention of our customers."

The brand has also added 'Vector search' that will play a crucial role in Recipe Rover's ability to provide customers with an effective way to discover the right ingredients for their recipes.