10 Years: A History of Chicory
This month, Chicory turns 10! As the leading contextual commerce advertising platform, we transform recipe content into commerce media. But as a team, we’re on a mission to build a company that people love working with and working at. Here are some highlights from our past decade!
Our History
2013
Yuni and Joey founded Chicory during their senior year at Colgate University. At the time, it was known as Recipe Into Reality! The core idea came from the ability to turn recipes into shoppable content. By the spring, they themselves were delivering the recipe ingredients to shoppers.
2014
In 2014, our co-founders moved to Yuni’s mom’s house in the suburbs of NYC, as they continued developing their business plan (and delivering the groceries). Later that year, they were accepted into the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator and raised their first round of financing!
2015
Chicory hired its first full-time employees, which included Amanda, who is still with us today! The small but mighty marketing team worked hard to get the word out about Chicory. We partnered with top food bloggers to grow our recipe network to over 1,000 recipe bloggers.
2016-2017
Our founders stumbled upon an idea that would benefit both content creators and brands: create unique ads that target recipe ingredients! We released Chicory Premium, our in-recipe, hyper-contextual ads, which quickly became a must-have for recipe publishers and brands. With this development, growing the company became a priority too.
2018
We got our first standalone office in the heart of New York City! By the end of this year, our team was 15 employees strong and we had partnered with over 1,200 recipe sites.
2019
Over the summer, one of our marketing team members wrote about Chicory’s growth. We had grown to 24 employees, nearly double from just the year prior.
Around this time, we released Multi-Retailer Shoppable Links, formerly known as Shopper Select. Multi-Retailer Links equitably represent retailer partners for brands and enable shoppers to build baskets at their preferred retailers directly from Chicory media or any digital touchpoint.
2020 - 2021
In January, Yuni and Joey made the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Class of 2020! We also made Built In’s ‘NYC Best Small Companies to Work For’ and Inc. 5000 lists.
As the pandemic began and disrupted many facets of life, we started reporting on consumer behavior trends within digital grocery, through our Annual Grocery Survey, Recipe Usage Report and Omnichannel Surveys, to help grocery stakeholders navigate the turbulent tides.
In June 2021, we welcomed Jason Young, a tenured digital media, ad technology and retail media industry veteran as President. Jason helped to strategically advise on company growth and business expansion during a pivotal time for digital grocery platforms.
We also witnessed the surge of retail media networks, catalyzed by major shifts like the death of the cookie. With contextual commerce, we were uniquely positioned to help retailers grow their first-party data sets.
2022 - Now
2022 brought commerce media, a category of digital advertising that drives commerce engagement, to the forefront of priority strategies across the industry.
Our contextual commerce platform has grown to 5,200+ recipe sites and garners 110M monthly unique shoppers, providing a significant opportunity for CPG brands and retailers to drive commerce in a highly-relevant context and allowing us to keep a close pulse on online grocery shopping trends.
We were named on Inc. 5000’s Fastest-Growing Company in America list and earned a place on Built In’s ‘Best Small Companies to Work For in NYC’ list.
The same year, we launched Branded Cart, which prioritizes specific brands in online grocery carts when consumers add ingredients from recipes using Chicory’s shoppable tech. We also launched Featured Retailer, a monetization tactic that allows retailers to gain more visibility within Chicory's shoppable recipe experience by being at the top of the retailer selection list. With priority ranking and increased logo size, retailers can steal valuable ecommerce share from competitor retailers and drive incremental traffic to their sites.
“Truly the most gratifying thing has been building a company with the most amazing people.”
Today, Chicory stands at nearly 50 employees and continues to be a flexible working environment — and yes, we’re hiring! Our employees are scattered across the country and we have an office in New York City, which local team members can use as they please. “We have no plans of forcing people into the office,” Yuni says.
Heading into 2023, we appointed Meghan Howard as Chief Revenue Officer. We’re looking forward to continuing innovating and propelling the next generation of content, commerce and advertising to propel the digital grocery industry forward.
We cannot wait to see what the next 10 years — and beyond — will bring!
