How to Upgrade Your Marketing by Using QR Codes for Recipes

These days, the pool of people launching cookbooks isn’t just for chefs; foodies, nutritionists, food bloggers/vloggers, and the like are curating recipes—opening up the possibilities for more to dive into the universe of creating content about food. The door is standing wide open for anyone with an unrelenting passion for food.  

But that doesn’t mean that food content creation or starting a food biz is easy—quite the contrary. Developing recipes, launching cookbooks, and attracting visitors to your recipe blog/vlog needs a marketing strategy from the divine—by that we mean QR Codes. If you stick around, you’ll discover just how much our QR Code types are the perfect ingredients for your food business. So tag along food enthusiasts, and follow our recipe! 

The perks of using QR Codes for recipes

QR Codes offer state-of-the-art marketing assistance for publishing your recipe book and building your online reputation on your recipe blog/vlog or social media channels. Plus, it can be used on virtually any material. Harness the power of using QR Codes for recipes and exploit every single benefit. 

Connects your audience to your social media platforms

Let’s say you have online traffic on your website, but no one has taken notice of your mouth-watering food content creation on your social media platforms. What do you do? Make them notice, of course—subtly. All they need is a gentle nudge in the right direction by placing a Social Media QR Code on your website that directs them to all of your social media channels in just one scan. 

Compatible with digital and print materials 

You can infuse QR Codes onto a great array of marketing materials. Their versatility allows you to place them on or in your hardcover recipe cookbook, your web banner on your recipe blog, or on your social media channels—the choice is yours. Want to broadcast the news about your food content? There’s a whole library of QR Code marketing materials from using them as QR Code stickers to  QR Code signage and plenty more! 

Customizable for your brand

Tailoring a QR Code for recipes whether that’s your recipe book, website, or vlog is intuitive as it is creative. Play around with crafting a QR Code image that aligns with your brand. You have the creative license to add the logo, colors, frame, and style that represents your brand. We’re in the business of making your brand more recognizable and making sure you’re happy with a QR Code design that fits with your brand image. 

A borderline perfect call to action 

We get a kick out of clicking on buttons and links to find out what’s happening on the other side of that click. Most of this happens unconsciously and habitually. So when we see an advertisement during the day that we can’t click on to “find out more”, we ignore the ad and go on with our days. 

A QR Code call to action doesn’t allow that.  When you see a QR Code ad, it instructs you on what to do next: “scan me”, “follow”, and “like” are some of the CTA’s (call-to-action) you can use to drive your user to take action. 

This allows for further engagement with the brand, product, or service. The only way to complete QR Code’s CTA is to scan it. Simplicity, accessibility, and convenience allow for this to happen. 

5 Tasty tips on how to use QR Codes for recipes 

#1 Integrate QR Codes into the design of your cookbook

Inside, outside, on top of—wherever there’s a space for a square block, make QR Codes part of the design of your recipe book. Connect the reader from your cookbook to the online world where you can interact with them in a different format. 

This way you can better guide your readers on how to cook/bake your recipe by connecting them to your online platform: your website and social media channels. Ditch sharing clunky URL addresses in your cookbook, adopt QR Codes for recipes instead. Try the Video QR Code for video content, the Social Media QR Code for all your socials or the Dynamic URL QR Code to link to your recipe website. 

This modernized approach takes us away from the traditional recipe books. Instead of observing static images and writing on a page, you draw your audience closer to a more humanized experience where they feel like they’re getting to know your brand via different online channels.  

Think of it this way: we don’t only love Jamie Oliver for his undeniably incredible recipe books, we love him as a personal brand; his charming personality, his unfaltering passion for food, and his unpretentious guidance for many home cookers. For years via video format, many have connected to his down-to-earth demeanor.

Using the Video QR Code, for example, enables your audience to build a connection with your content beyond the pages: instead of learning how to cook a spaghetti carbonara through the traditional formal, you’re inviting your audience to whip up a meal with them through video so that your audience feels as if they’re in the kitchen with you, guiding them step by step. 
Now ain’t that a breath of fresh air? The best part: you still experience the joy of print with a touch of tech—intersecting the best of both worlds simultaneously. Visit our page for more QR Code printing tips.

#2 Incorporate web banners onto your recipe website 

If you launching a cookbook, let your loyal readers know. Your website is the place to make some noise about your cookbook baby. Rally the fans of your recipe book and invite them to celebrate this monumental moment with you.

But if you want your readers to eat up your food content—and hopefully gobble up all your finger-licking-good meals they’ll be cooking up from your recipe creation, offer your readers a special offer exclusive only to them. A handy QR Code solution is a Coupon QR Code. 

One way to display your promo to your readers is using a web banner. Exhibiting your display ad in a location they can clearly see will make sure that your readers know they’re getting a discount on their favorite recipe developer’s new cookbook. 

An added bonus of QR Codes on web banners is that you’re inviting your readers to engage with your content with their smartphones as well. Instead of clicking, they’re scanning. Plus you’re giving your readers a reward they won’t want to turn down. 

QR Codes on banners also happen to make your banner stand out and have a clear CTA. Check out the image below.

#3 Overdeliver with a free eBook 

eBooks are known as the classic lead magnets that help convert leads into sales. It’s also a simple yet effective way to strengthen your niche authority. Compiling the content of your eBook should be easy-breezy-lemon-squeezy, too: you just need to know which recipes are getting the most attention on your blog.

Once you’ve gathered all the content, you can work on the aesthetics. We suggest you exploit the space to surprise your readers as they flip through the pages. Besides embedding the kind of visual content filled with food photography that will make your audience drool, we suggest you take a marketing guru on board: a QR Code. 

This way you can direct your readers to different channels. Got more content to share on social media? Show them a Social Media QR Code. Got voice audios to share? Show them an MP3 QR Code. Got a recipe scanner app to share? Use an App QR Code. The list goes on the amount ways you can use QR Codes for recipes. 

#4 Create an all-in-one recipe and shopping list 

Research shows that prior to people shopping online for groceries, they’re browsing recipes. This is telling. The desire for discovering new recipes goes hand-in-hand with buying specific ingredients to make that meal. 

Curating a recipe with the ingredients that can easily be added to a grocery list is a customer need. And as a recipe developer, you can fulfill that need by getting people to rely on your food blog to make their meals. 

Go the extra mile by creating a printable PDF document where you exhibit the recipe and the shopping list in one place. We also have a simple solution that can convert your PDF to a QR Code: a PDF QR Code. This makes saving recipes a thousand times easier. 

Our solution is versatile, too: you can print it in your cookbook, weave it into the layout of your Ebook, showcase it on your website banner, or even include it in your email newsletters. As a model, draw inspiration from our fictional brand, Bilberries’ Hillside Farm’s newsletter below, and learn how to use QR Codes for recipes.

#5 Start selling your own food products 

Let’s say your biz is really taking off and you’re ready to take it up a notch, then you should consider selling your own food product and selling it on the market. Selling your food product, whether that’s your unique cookie mix, your grandma’s secret hot sauce, or your dad’s jars of jam, can help you level up in your business. 

The advantage of selling your own food product is that you have full creative control over the packaging and marketing of your product. That means you can put whatever you like on your product packaging. And if you’d like to share a recipe you’ve developed and direct consumers to your website, there’s a simple route to do that—implementing a QR Code on packaging. 

Using a QR Code recipe on the packaging is also a way to retrieve more online traffic to your website. Try the Dynamic QR Code to link your food blog to your product so you can get your customers to browse your website for any food content and other food products you have. Get inspired by how fictional company Betty Bakes, bridged the connection between their products and their recipe and model how to scan food for recipes. 

3 use cases for using QR Codes for recipes 

#1 Fustini’s products share a library of recipes

Fustini’s is an Italian-inspired brand that sells bottles of olive oil and balsamic vinegar—two essential pantry ingredients. During the heart of the coronavirus pandemic, the Fustini’s company noticed a trend in utilizing QR Codes, which sparked a revolutionary idea: adding a QR Code to their bottle labels. 

Once the concept was born, they went full steam ahead and designed a QR Code that directed users from the bottle to a webpage. The webpage is a library of recipes that incorporate Fustilini’s olive oil and balsamic vinegar. From scanning to cooking, users can create a feast of meals—all in one place. 

Fustini’s products show us that the potential of using packaging to share recipes is possible. They also make for great gift ideas for the food enthusiast who’s always on the hunt to try new recipes. Can you imagine a future where we scan food for recipes? It’s not far out of reach, anymore. 

#2 Molly Baz’s cookbook features a QR Code recipe 

A modern cookbook has reached the racks and the hearts of many with the desire to learn culinary skills. Traditional cookbooks only show the instructions in writing but this cookbook is no ordinary one: it has QR Codes. 

Baz is known for her work as a former food editor at Bon Appétit, but among other things, she’s a cook, recipe developer, video host, and foodie at heart. The colorful pages of her new book, Cook This Book, are filled with QR Codes, which contributes to its minimalist aesthetic. 

But it’s not only about the clever design that makes you want to pick it up and cook up a storm: it’s practical and convenient for novice to intermediate home cookers. It’s for the humble home cooker who secretly wants to know how to chop an onion correctly or the aspirational Masterchef who wants to try their whisk at making a kick-ass aioli. 

Readers can learn and master all of these more complex culinary techniques through short video tutorials when they scan a QR Code recipe, eliminating the need for recipe scanning apps. A touch of tech in this contemporary cookbook demonstrates how easy it is to innovate the traditional recipe book.

#3 Whisk turns recipes and shopping lists into QR Codes 

Whisk is an all-in-one cooking management app for recipe organization, grocery shopping, meal planning, and recipe sharing. So if you’re searching for how to share recipes online with your friends and family, or cutting down on meal-prepping time, this is the app for it. 

Whisk’s latest development of their artificial intelligence (AI) app has integrated QR Codes into their product, which has majorly benefitted Delicious Magazine, a beloved recipe magazine in the UK. 

Whisk partnered with Delicious Magazine for their November issue by adding QR Codes to some of their recipes. The convenience of QR Codes in one location allows users to create their shopping lists on the recipe page, just by scanning the recipe QR Code. 

More, users have the option of selecting their preferred method of shopping: online or in-store shopping. Recipe scanner apps like Whisk reveal the possibilities of food content creation and cooking management—that tech and innovation can provide less hassle for a society that has little to no time to cook.  

Developing food content is no small food baby. But when you whisk QR Codes in the mixture, you add an essential marketing ingredient to your food business. Follow the recipes of how to add QR Codes for recipes to your food blog, magazine, cookbook, or your food product. Achieve more, flop less.