Pecco: The Rising Japanese Recipe App That Became an Industry Leader 

‍💡 3-line snippets of ZIPANG's articles

✅ Pecco, an app service, ranked second on the review platform ‘my best’.

✅ Developed in 2018, it recommends recipes to eat today by entering data about ingredients at home

✅ Differentiated by its AI recommendation system, lightweight and functional, it quickly rose to #2 in the highly competitive Japanese cuisine recipe market

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Pecco is a Japanese cooking recipe app

It has an AI feature that lets you enter ingredients you have at home into the app and gives you a recipe for what you can cook. It was ranked second in the cooking recipe category by ‘my best’, a Japanese app service and product review platform.

In the Japanese app market, the rankings don't tend to change much from #1 to #200, so it's hard for new apps to gain traction in the market. However, Pecco's second place in the cooking recipe category shows the power of a small company, even though it only has 10 employees.

Today, I'm going to share the story of how Pecco, a new player in the Japanese app market, stood out in the more entrenched cooking recipe app space, and how it took off. I think it's a great story for startups doing business in Japan.

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1. Pecco app ranks #2 on product review platform my best recommended cooking apps ranking

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My best is a local Japanese platform that provides reviews and ranking chart content for various apps and products.

In total, they ranked 46 cooking recipe apps, covering a wide range of apps because Japanese people are interested in cooking recipes. The rankings are based on their own criteria using the charts of popular apps such as Appliv and Google Play Charts.

In particular, there were a lot of apps that were so famous that they had TV commercials on the top 10.

Cookpad, which has been providing cooking recipes since 1998, has consistently been the No. 1 cooking recipe app. In 2023, the number of users reached 51 million, which is about the same as the number of people in Korea. Below the No. 2 spot was “Macaroni,” which provides recipes from professional nutritionists and chefs, “Rakuten Recipe,” which was created by Japanese giant Rakuten, and “DELISH KITCHEN,” which appeared and grew significantly during the period of explosive consumption of video content due to the rise of YouTube.

The same is true of Japanese app services in other industries, but in cooking app services, the leading players have been in the top rankings for more than a decade, and they are consistently ranked highly. Due to the content structure of cooking recipes, it is not possible for a newcomer to make a big splash by boosting sales through events that encourage users to make purchases for a certain period of time as in games.

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2. Secret Sauce of Pecco growing and rising as new app in Japan

Pecco had over 500,000 users as of 2023. There are three reasons why Pecco was able to make a big impact in the red ocean market, where it is difficult for new services to penetrate.

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1. Branding to differentiate: AI to help clean out the fridge and make meal recommendations 

→ It utilizes AI to recommend recipes that combine ingredients from your fridge and home.

→ If you keep entering your food data, you can also make customized diet recommendations.

→ Furthermore, it also helps users save money and positioned itself as an eco-friendly cooking recipe app.

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2. Acquire new users: By lowering the hurdle for cooking, Pecco targeted the beginners.

→ The app makes it easy to cook with ingredients you already have at home, reducing the burden of grocery shopping and buying new tools.

→ Pecco was able to target the beginner segment, which has the largest number of users who are new to cooking.

→ There's even a “Microwave Recipes” category in the app for beginners.

3.Increased Retention: Becoming a lifestyle-friendly cookbook

→ The more I use it, the more it personalizes the data for me.

→ The more you use it, the more customized the recipes and suggestions for what to eat next become.

→ It became an app that I use in my daily life naturally.

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Cooking is very popular in Japan!

There are many different types of cooking content in Japan, from recipe books on the market to social media accounts where ordinary people who are interested in cooking post their dishes, to a drama called <Lone Gourmet>, where a corporate salaryman eats alone, which has 10 seasons and many spin-offs. When you look up a recipe, you'll find everything from “fancy dishes made with an oven and ingredients you can't buy at the local supermarket” to “quick dishes you can make in less than a minute”.

But no matter how many recipes there are, and no matter how much expertise you have, the hardest part is deciding what to eat and what ingredients you can use to make it, especially when you're shopping for groceries. It was this pain point that inspired Pecco to develop the idea.

Mr. Funagoshi, the CEO of GEEKWORKS, the service provider of Pecco, once said that “it was hard to come up with a menu while thinking about what's in the fridge every day.” The app's creator understood the pain of cooking food himself, and created Pecco as a way to solve the problem. The message of Pecco was clear: using Pecco can be beneficial in solving the daily and troublesome problem of “what's for dinner tonight?”

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3. Pecco doesn't have any paid products in the app

Pecco sells its services to companies as a food and product influencer, culinary social media channel management and marketing & recipe development agency. It's a B2B business, not a B2C business.

Pecco doesn't sell any in-app paid products, so users can feel that the app is focused on providing recipes and dietary guidance. It's literally an app that allows you to “focus on cooking.” 

At the same time, they optimized user accessibility. Not only in the app, but also on the website and Instagram channel so that you can view recipes without signing in. It's also lightweight because it's based on photos, card news, and text.

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By making it accessible to users, Pecco quickly gained users in the cooking recipe app market.

Thanks to its rapid growth, Pecco was able to attract attention from the market: it was featured on corporate TV and social media channels; it was featured in TV programs, newspapers, and magazines; it was selected to manage the cooking accounts of Japanese companies on social media, and it has been working on projects to increase the number of followers to over 30,000; and it has been working as an influencer for specific foods or products.

By creating a differentiated structure that generates sales from B2B, Pecco could establish a sustainable business as a latecomer.

If you're interested enough in cooking to buy a recipe, you're going to buy a recipe book, and if you're buying it on an app, you're likely to already pay for the recipe in the app service that the first mover has created. On the other hand, users who want to cook easy and solid meals are less likely to buy recipes, because they want to save money and cook with what they have at home.

I assume the process of defining the strength and weakness of Pecco through market research and analysis in Japan led the company to grow from a late entrant to the second largest player in the industry.

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💡I learned these things while preparing this article

1) It's important to find differentiation and strengths of your product

Even if it's a cooking recipe app, solving user's problems can be quite unique. Pecco shows that even if there is a company that has been the number one for more than 10 years, it is possible to grow as a latecomer if you have a distinct advantage.

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2) Pecco grew by targeting the beginner market

Pecco opened up all of its channels - app, web, and social media - to make it accessible to beginners. Beginners are the largest market segment, and Pecco provided easy instructions on how to cook for beginners, so even people who had never cooked before became new users. 

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3) Consistency is key

Every day, recipes, photos, and written descriptions of recipes are posted on Pecco's Instagram in the form of card news. By consistently posting content on a daily basis, which is easier to watch than videos, the company was able to take on the operation and marketing projects of the cooking social media channel.

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4) Interacting with users

The more data you enter into Pecco, the more detailed recipes and meal recommendations you can get. Eating is a daily activity, so it naturally became a lifestyle app. In addition, it also serves as a channel for people who are interested in cooking and those who have created their own recipes to brand themselves as chefs. Pecco realized that people who are interested in cooking in Japan tend to post their dishes on social media on a daily basis, so Pecco is always looking for user recipes.

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You can read more about Pecco's B2B business success story here.

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‍Written by ZIPANG (Link)

※Original Source : 업계 2위로 성장한 후발주자 일본 요리 레시피 앱 

※This article was not reviewed for English translation by the original author‍