Guided Cooking Experience

AMC, a leading manufacturer of high-quality cooking systems, faced the challenge of creating an innovative cooking and customer retention platform to expand their product portfolio with a digital offering. We supported AMC in developing a comprehensive Guided Cooking platform that offers customers a unique cooking experience. By seamlessly integrating product and recipe data, providing intelligent step-by-step instructions, and incorporating IoT-enabled cookware, we have created a future-oriented solution that combines technology and culinary art.

AMC, known for innovative cooking systems and high-quality materials, recognised the potential to expand its product portfolio with a digital platform. The goal was to offer customers comprehensive added value and introduce them to the world of 'Guided Cooking'.

The central challenge was to consolidate the extensive data from AMC's existing product and recipe databases, make it dynamically adaptable and expandable, and finally provide it in a modern, customer-oriented app. With over 50,000 recipes, each linked to ingredients, nutritional values, images, and portion size calculations in up to 13 languages, this was a complex task.

Additionally, the guided recipes needed to include multiple branching steps to allow editors to select relevant ingredients and products. At the same time, logic errors by content creators had to be prevented. Another requirement was the integration of existing intelligent AMC cookware via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to lay the foundation for the technology-supported cooking experience.

Our first step was to thoroughly analyse AMC's current data structure. We integrated the product and recipe databases into the Umbraco CMS to centrally manage all relevant data points. Given the enormous amount of data, we proceeded step by step and implemented a validation system to ensure the accuracy of the Guided Cooking recipes after updates.

The Umbraco CMS backend was significantly expanded to provide editors with powerful tools for creating and managing recipes. This included options for displaying different user paths based on users' products and custom workflows for managing the status of Guided Cooking recipes in individual language versions.

To make the data now prepared in the CMS available for the app, we developed the AMC backend as the second core component of the platform. This not only meets the high requirements for data availability but also offers the possibility of integrating other crucial functional areas. For example, we implemented a Single Sign-On solution (AMC ID) for easy access to platform content.

Another important aspect was the integration of intelligent cookware as an Internet of Things (IoT) solution. For this, we integrated the Azure IoT Hub and implemented communication with AMC cookware via Bluetooth (app) and Wi-Fi (backend). To make the cooking experience as comfortable as possible for users, we added additional information and push notifications.

For the development of the mobile app, which needed to be available for both Android and iOS, we chose the cross-platform technology React Native. The user-friendly presentation of the content and Guided Cooking required an intensive collaborative process of UX and UI design.

The result of our collaboration is a robust and future-oriented AMC Guided Cooking platform that seamlessly fits into the vision of AMC's product portfolio. Thanks to the user-friendly backend, complex cooking processes with numerous data points can be efficiently managed. The entire platform solution is designed as a flexible foundation for future extensions. An external IT audit commissioned by AMC also confirmed the modern architecture and technological implementation of the AMC Guided Cooking platform at the highest level. With our solution, AMC is well-positioned to expand its product portfolio with a digital, customer-oriented offering and deepen its relationship with its customers.