Favour is changing how food brands understand recipe performance. Founded by Nick Gilbert, it captures the step most food companies never see: when inspiration turns into action. The free meal-planning app allows users to import recipes from almost anywhere—photos, screenshots, cookbooks, websites, social media, blogs—and convert them into a shoppable grocery list linked directly to the supermarket online checkout. That same flow, from recipe to basket, creates a data trail that traditional food marketing has struggled to capture.
“Food brands invest heavily in recipe content, but they’ve got no idea about its performance and what works well and what doesn’t,” Gilbert says. “That’s the problem we’re solving.”
For decades, recipes have been treated as a brand-building tool rather than a measurable channel. Brands commission content, place it on websites or packaging, and hope it influences purchasing decisions somewhere down the line. What’s been missing is visibility about whether a recipe is saved, shopped, cooked, or abandoned halfway through.
Favour changes that by tracking behaviour at the moment it matters most: when a home cook decides whether to turn the recipe into a real meal. “We’ve got really interesting data because we don’t restrict people to branded recipes,” Gilbert explains. “We’ve got data to show what the true trends actually are.”
That’s what separates Favour from other recipe platforms. Favour does not limit users to curated brand recipes, it allows people to choose what they genuinely want to cook. The result is a more honest picture of consumer behaviour, one that shows how branded ingredients perform when competing against everything else in a home cook’s digital world.
And it’s not just raw numbers. Gilbert is careful to point out that data alone isn’t enough. “It’s more about insight as opposed to just the data,” he says. “You’ve got the raw data, and then you’ve got insights based on that data. And we help the food brand with that too.”
Those insights can reveal which ingredients are being substituted, which products drop out at the shopping stage, and which recipes actually lead to purchases. For brands accustomed to working with delayed or aggregated sales figures, it’s a fundamentally different level of feedback.
The shift didn’t happen overnight. Favour began as a consumer-first product, born during COVID when converting recipes into online supermarket orders became an unexpected pain point. Driven by his frustration with rigid meal kits and the cost of feeding a household, Gilbert picked up the idea from a friend and built the business from there.
“I immediately saw this and thought, I could do better with more recipes, getting delivered any day of the week, with less waste, all for half the price,” he says. That insight and the fact that Favour is free for consumers, helped the app reach thousands of users, but it also revealed a second, larger opportunity—working with food brands.
What sets Favour apart is its ability to link recipe engagement directly to shopping behaviour without forcing brands into a one-size-fits-all model. As a smaller, nimble platform, Gilbert says Favour can deliver tailored reporting rather than generic dashboards. “I can give them customised reports,” he says. “I’m small. I’m nimble. I can provide what they want.”
That flexibility has resonated with early partners. Gilbert currently has multiple food brands in pilot programmes and is targeting paid six-month contracts as the next step. “Ten food brands on a six-month contract would be okay,” he says. “Thirty would be fantastic.”
Crucially, the value proposition isn’t framed as immediate sales uplift. It’s about learning more about consumers and discovering new opportunities to meet their needs. It’s a shift from persuasion to understanding, helping brands see how real households interact with their products in everyday cooking decisions. As Gilbert puts it, “From phone to plate: effortless for households, measurable for brands.”
Gilbert says one of his biggest entrepreneurial lessons has been the need to stay flexible and let the product evolve based on real-world feedback. This has always been part of the product development, but moving from a consumer-only focus toward a dual model that includes food brands has been significant. “I thought my killer feature was the ability to import a recipe from anywhere,” he says. While users love this idea, adoption didn’t scale as quickly as he expected, but it helped him recognise how valuable the consumer data was. “So now I’m back to my third business pivot,” he says, driven by providing genuine value for food companies.
As Favour scales, that dual focus may prove to be its strongest asset. By solving a genuine problem for home cooks, the platform creates the behavioural data food brands have been chasing for years without trying to convince consumers to change how they cook.
For NZ food brands navigating tighter budgets and higher expectations, that kind of clarity could be the most valuable ingredient of all.
Interview and story by Leighton Littlewood.
