The archive · Content & Film · Marketing decision · 2023
SkipTheDishes 'Inflation Cookbook': a recipe book that re-reads grocery prices weekly
An AI cookbook that tracks 400 grocery prices weekly and rewrites seven recipes around whatever got cheapest — Best of Discipline at One Show 2024.
SkipTheDishes (Skip Express Lane)
What it had to solve
In 2022–2023 food inflation was hammering Canadian households and the food-delivery brand SkipTheDishes wanted to be useful rather than add another 'save money' ad. Its grocery arm Skip Express Lane and Dentsu Creative Canada built a living digital cookbook instead of a campaign.
How it works
SkipTheDishes, Canada's food-delivery platform, responded to the 2022–23 grocery inflation squeeze with something it had never shipped before: a cookbook. The Inflation Cookbook, built with Dentsu Creative Canada, is an interactive digital tool that tracks food prices and turns them into recipes — not once, but every week, as prices move.
The mechanics made a generic promise concrete. The tool monitors roughly 400 items — produce, whole grains, dairy and select proteins — and each week isolates the top ten trending down and the top ten trending up in price across regions. It adapts to household size and grocery budget, swaps ingredients for dietary restrictions, and lets a nutritionist and a chef choose seven recipes assembled from that week's best-priced foods. Inflation stops being a headline and becomes the menu planner.
Delivery brands usually win with speed or convenience; here the winning idea was to be useful at the moment of maximum stress. The cookbook ran alongside a food-security commitment: Skip donated C$100,000 to Food Banks Canada and pledged the surplus food from its 23 Skip Express Lane fulfilment centres to local food banks, with interim CEO Steve Puchala framing the tool as part of that hunger-relief effort.
The judges at The One Show 2024 gave the work its Best of Discipline in Creative Use of Data — a data idea that didn't visualize numbers for its own sake, but turned a live dataset into something a family could cook.
Why it lands
- The data was the product, not decoration: recipes were literally rebuilt from that week's price movements, so the tool only got more relevant as inflation moved.
- It turned a macro-economic pain (CPI) into an individual, household-sized answer — budget in, dietary needs in, best-priced meals out.
- The nutritionist-plus-chef layer added credibility an automated list could not, making a data tool feel like a caring service.
- Tying the tool to a C$100,000 Food Banks Canada donation and surplus-food pledges kept the brand's utility claim honest and newsworthy.
What it did
The cookbook won Best of Discipline for Creative Use of Data at The One Show 2024 for Dentsu Creative Canada. It launched inside a food-security push: Skip donated C$100,000 to Food Banks Canada and pledged all surplus food from its 23 Skip Express Lane fulfilment centres to local food banks.
What you can take
When the message is 'we feel the price pain', make the medium the proof: a utility that recomputes itself with live data outlasts any ad that merely talks about data.
Since then
The Inflation Cookbook stayed live as a weekly-updated tool after launch, and at The One Show 2024 the entry earned Dentsu Creative Canada the Best of Discipline award for Creative Use of Data. The food-bank relationship continued past the launch — Skip later ran charity campaigns with Food Banks Canada, including a Giving Tuesday order-based donation drive covered by the same trade press. For the Canadian delivery market, the cookbook became the reference example of grocery marketing built on live pricing data rather than imagery.
Sources
- Marcel dominates The One Show 2024, winning Best of Show and multiple disciplines
- SkipTheDishes drops AI-powered 'Inflation Cookbook'
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