MAGGI observed that an increasing number of especially younger consumers lack the time, inspiration, and skills to cook fresh meals at home. MAGGI wanted show them how easy it really is to conjure up tasty, home-cooked meals in a way that would fit seamlessly into their busy lives and accommodate their specific media consumption behavior.

So MAGGI launched KiM – kitchen intelligence by MAGGI. Its first chatbot cooking experience on WhatsApp. The chatbot is based on sophisticated AI which enables KiM to chat with the users in a natural human way. Through this KiM builds valuable relationships with the users. KiM asks for their food preferences and specific diets and always finds the best matching recipe. KiM supports them to improve their skills in the first chatbot-based cooking class. Secret ingredient: Entertainment: KiM has a great sense of humor & teaches users through fun quizzes, how-to's, and crazy food hacks.

With the launch on WhatsApp MAGGI wanted to create an evolutionary experience of conversational consumer experience in culinary. Three years of training were neccessary to reach a sufficient technological maturity, because KiM is driven by natural language understanding (NLU). This allows the chatbot to interpret a broad variety of input messages from the user to have human-like conversations. KiM is specifically developed and trained for MAGGI and the culinary context. The bot was initially rolled-out as recipe search on facebook messenger in 2017. This is where the bot was trained and optimized on real data. After this comprehensive development the technology allowed advanced dialogues and was ready to be applied for MAGGI's first WhatsApp cooking-experience. This innovation rejuvenates the brand and creates a engaging touchpoint to stay relevant and connected with the modern consumers.

As the most used messenger in Germany, WhatsApp was selected as the ideal channel to connect with the consumers. MAGGI and the cross-functional project team explored how to create real value for their consumers to establish WhatsApp as a high engaging touchpoint to build up lasting relationships.

The idea of the cooking classes "Bella Italia" and "Easy cooking" was to have a chatbot-assistant that guides the users step-by-step to a whole new culinary experience. Through WhatsApp conversations KiM supports them thoughout the entire cooking journey: inspiring through tasty, simple and fast recipes and helping to cook those by sharing food preparation tips and food-hacks and how-to videos. MAGGI wanted to show how fun it is and to create a very refreshing experience. This is why gamification and edutainment is core to the cooking classes. Fun quizzes and a great sense of humor make this experience something extraordinary.

Agile Development from idea to launch: Oct 2019-May 2020. KiM is constantly trained and further scaled through new features.