They’ve got to be working on this, right? It’s just that it’s a hard problem, and that’s why we haven’t seen this product, right?

Back when I was not driving, I considered buying groceries online to be delivered. I live in the sort of “city” neighborhood where I have a lot of options for this sort of thing. But then I realized that I had no idea what I wanted to buy. My usual grocery-shopping strategy is to wander the store aimlessly and buy whatever seems interesting together with whatever various staple items I always buy out of habit. And I always forget something important, so I go back to the store a few days later to get whatever I forgot together with whatever catches my eye. This model does not transfer well to online grocery shopping.

Lots of companies are working on putting together really robust recipe databases. Ingredients, quantities, nutrition facts, difficulty ratings, star reviews, all that. You see where this is going, right?

The grocery store (and I am nominating Amazon-Whole Foods to pilot this) should have an app that lets me pick meals for the week (it can suggest some things based on options that I’ve selected), and then it tells me what ingredients I would need and lets me add them to my cart–allowing for a manual override if I want to substitute or omit an ingredient. I could also add various staple items as recurring purchases.

The tedious part here would be matching the way that the ingredients are coded in the database to the grocery store’s SKUs. Probably also getting quantities to match up in a reasonable way. Someone would need to tell the computer the density of flour because flour is sold by weight, but most US recipes consume flour by volume. But this is also the sort of task that tech companies are very good at outsourcing to offshore contractors.

Eventually the system would use its Big Data to make better suggestions. It would know that I bought flour last week, so it could ask if I still have flour left for this week’s recipes. It would know what I’ve chosen before, so it can do some sort of straight-forward clustering to suggest things that I would also probably like.

Grocery stores are notorious for having very low margins, and this sort of app could help them extract more money from customers who value convenience over price. (It’s not the right product for the sort of shopper who goes to four different stores to get the best price on everything.) It would be pretty simple for the interface to suggest the version of an item with the highest margin and to require a few clicks for the customer to select a different brand or variety. Likewise, it could suggest recipes that include items that the store is particularly eager to sell (for whatever reason). Not to mention that it makes it easier for someone to always shop at the same store.