M&S – Food Inspiration IN-store Touch Screen App

M&S wanted to inspire their customers with recipes from the ingredients they have available instore.

FLOATING POINT working with Outform created the Food Inspiration kiosk – a touch screen, placed in stores that allowed the shopper to quickly discover inspirational recipes using the ingredients that are immediately available to them.

The touchscreen app asked three simple questions – how much time do you have, what’s the main ingredient, and what is the meal occasion (family, special, quick, etc.). The app would then search the database of M&S recipes to find ones that matched their criteria. The shopper was presented with a number of recipes that described the ingredients required, prep & cooking time and the method.

The shopper had the option to scan the recipe QR code to get the recipe on their device and also to print a receipt with a list of ingredients on a receipt printer attached to the kiosk.

FLOATING POINT designed and developed the app and specified the hardware with the M&S project team and conducted user research in a range of stores across the UK. FLOATING POINT created a custom CMS to manage recipes on the kiosks throughout the different seasons and the availability of ingredients in individual stores.

The QR codes used were created by the Outform QR code system, created by FLOATING POINT, that has been implemented for many of Outform’s clients. The QR code system generated artwork in a range of graphical formats for online and print use and was developed to integrate with Google Data Studio to generate usage reports.

The kiosk was developed to be self-managed, allowing it to power up and power down inline with the stores power schedule and update itself via a CI/CD pipeline as new features were pushed. The kiosks are also self monitoring reporting any potential issues back to the team.