Ben envisions a future where every recipe shared on social media becomes instantly shoppable. As founder of Grocers List, Ben Jabbawy is creating the first commerce platform designed specifically for food creators, transforming how millions of followers discover and shop for recipes online.

From E-commerce Tools to Food Creator Platform

After successfully founding Privy, a marketing platform used by over 100,000 Shopify stores that generated more than $10 billion in sales pre-acquisition, Ben identified a crucial gap in the creator economy. His experience building tools for e-commerce merchants and his passion for home cooking revealed an untapped opportunity.

“I cook a lot at home and realize, ‘Wow, there’s a lot of these recipe influencers; they’re growing quickly and using a lot of software tools, but they weren’t built for food,” Ben explains. “There’s nothing more frustrating than finding a great recipe on Instagram that you want to cook today and how hard it is to find the ingredients for that.”

The insight emerged when comparing the experience to traditional e-commerce: “If you compare that experience to looking at a great T-shirt online or shopping on Amazon, you know those products can show up at your door tomorrow or today even in some cases. So why doesn’t that same convenience exist for shopping recipes?”

Drawing from his previous success, Ben recognized the potential of specialized software. 

“If you can find lots of business owners with a similar workflow, and you solve problems just for that type of business owner, you can unlock a lot of magic for them,” he says. “There are probably tens of thousands of food creators worldwide growing, and they’re all different, but they all have similar challenges on the Internet.”

Unlocking New Revenue Streams for Food Creators

The platform addresses a fundamental misalignment in current food creator revenue models. 

“Today, food creators make 80-100% of the revenue from the website ads displayed when you go to the recipe, but it has nothing to do with someone wanting to cook that recipe,” Ben points out. “It doesn’t help them capture the intent of the audience that they have.”

With extensive experience in e-commerce and marketing technology, Ben identified opportunities to innovate for food creators. 

“I think there’s a lot of great software on the Internet for creators broadly,” he explains. “There are great email marketing and social automation platforms, but none are innovative for the food creator. Bringing those two things together just for food creators is already creating many waves and helping us fill the demand people didn’t know existed in the market.”

The platform offers three core tools that create a comprehensive monetization plan building upon existing revenue streams:

Automated Recipe Sharing

“You can set up a keyword,” Ben explains. “If you want this recipe, comment ‘meatball sub’ or comment ‘recipe,’ and the creator will send you a DM with a clickable link. We will automatically make that visual look good because you already have great food photography.” 

“It’s very hands-off for the creator, and we’ll feed their core revenue stream today: ads on the website,” he adds.

Email List Building

“Instead of just leaving it in their Instagram, you can bookmark it and save it to your email,” Ben explains. “The whole exchange is automated. As the creator, you’re growing your email list. As a follower, I get the convenience of just moving this to my email.” 

Ben describes the benefit of followers bookmarking the recipe to email instead of leaving it in the DM as “searchable” and “referenceable,” adding that it can also drive more traffic for the creator.

Shop the Recipe

“If you want to conveniently add these ingredients as a follower with a click to your Instacart or your Amazon Fresh, we will grab the ingredients from the recipe because we’re already integrated into your website,” Ben says. 

“We will turn that into a single-click button that opens the Instacart app or Amazon Fresh and adds these to the cart. As the creator, you will earn an affiliate sale from anyone buying the ingredients through these buttons.”

Ben highlights the system’s seamless integration: “Basically, we’re going to drive more traffic to the ads you sell. We will help you build an audience that you own through email marketing. And we’ll open new affiliate sales opportunities by just making it easy to buy the ingredients of those recipes, all without you lifting a finger.”

Making Live Content Shoppable

Grocers List introduces innovative features for monetizing real-time content. 

“Many creators in the food industry do Instagram lives, and maybe they’re doing a new recipe once a week in front of their audience,” Ben explains. “Typically, it’s very difficult to monetize that because they’re watching the Instagram Live. There’s nothing to click and no way to drive a call to action.”

The solution combines simplicity with effectiveness: “You, as the creator, can attach a link to that word, and if someone on your Instagram Live comments that word, let’s say it’s ‘Shop’ or ‘Pepper,’ you can set it up in advance to send them the affiliate link to your Pepper grinder.”

He continues, “Typically what the creator does is they start their Instagram Live, write a comment, pin that comment to the live broadcast, and anyone who comments that word throughout the broadcast gets a DM from the creator.”

This approach modernizes traditional shopping channels for social media: “It’s like QVC here in America, which they’re talking about a product, and you get to call them and order it. We’re enabling creators to unlock those experiences and drive traffic to whatever product they’re talking about or selling through an affiliate or sponsored link from the brand,” Ben says.

Balancing Automation with Personal Connection

While focusing on automation, Ben highlights maintaining genuine creator-follower relationships. 

“The most successful creators reply to comments and direct messages themselves,” he notes. “That’s crucial. I think that makes your followers feel like they trust you.”

“All the automation that we provide is not about replacing these interactions, but it’s about enhancing them with clickable links that drive convenience for the followers who want those things,” Ben explains. 

“We find that it’s additive and drives engagement when asking people to comment. Normally, that person might not comment on your post, but they will comment if they want the link to what you’re talking about.”

The metrics demonstrate success. “The click-through rates on these sorts of engagements – because the DMs are sent from the creator themselves – are over 70%,” Ben reveals. “It’s insane. My last company was an email marketing company. We sent SMSs on behalf of the brands. The click-through rates in those other channels pale compared to what we see from the creator’s side.”

Growth Through Accessible Pricing

Grocers List implements a pricing strategy reflecting Ben’s understanding of creator needs:

• Free for creators with less than 25,000 followers
• $30/month for 25,000-500,000 followers
• $100/month for 500,000-2 million followers
• Custom plans for creators with over 2 million followers

“It’s predictable,” explains Ben. “You know exactly what you’re going to pay every month. And it’s based on the follower count because the more followers you have, the more value we’ll bring to the table for you as a creator.”

The Future is Cooking

With hundreds of creators reaching a combined audience of 100 million followers, Grocers List has established a foothold in digital food commerce. 

“We’re expecting online grocery and grocery delivery to skyrocket over the next five years,” says Ben. “Our vision is to create an omnichannel suite for the food creators to embed these types of tools in any surface area where they have an audience, on their recipe blog, email marketing, and TikTok, even in their cookbooks.”

“Nothing has empowered entrepreneurship more than the Internet,” Ben reflects. “It’s even more true in food because we eat food three times a day, and it’s some of the most engaging content on the Internet. This is a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs who want to become creators in this space, and they can find different niches.”

“The cool thing is that all it takes is consistency,” Ben concludes. “If you can be consistent, then you could build an audience. And if you can build an audience, then you can build a business around that. I’m excited about that opportunity for our customers and about building tools that make that easier for them.”