Premier kitchen and home brand, Food52, is bringing its award-winning recipes, step-by-step instructions, ingredient lists, and food photography out of the screen and into users' kitchens. Magic Leap’s first-ever food partner, Food52, chose to work with the spatial computing pioneer for their first step into the spatial web, to show their community the kitchen of the future and give them a new way to experience the world of Food52.

Food52’s community initially came together at a time where user-generated recipes were a new concept and traditional print publications were authorities leading a one-way conversation. Most recently, the Food52 community has been co-designing innovative kitchen and home products with the brand’s commerce team as seen in their direct-to-consumer Five Two line. Now with Magic Leap One, Food52’s community will make history as their recipes are brought to life in a first-of-its-kind spatial cooking experience.

Food52’s Product and UX team interviewed and surveyed thousands of home cooks to find out their pain points in a modern kitchen as part of the user-centric redesign of their recipe pages earlier this year. What they discovered was home cooks were fed up with constantly switching back and forth between ingredients and preparation steps on a device, especially with unwashed hands. While the Food52 team solved for that in a novel way for phones and tablets — by providing a toggle to display ingredients and prep steps in parallel — they felt that the best, truly hands-free option was Magic Leap One.

“From day one we knew the ideal experience would be a deconstructed recipe appearing right in the places you need it in the kitchen,” explained Ryan Charles, Chief Product Officer at Food52. “And the idea of extending our existing web platform versus fully developing a native app was appealing as our first foray into spatial computing. Magic Leap made that possible, and actually fairly simple.”

Food52 took their user research and placed it at the center of their development. They began by simply standing in their test kitchens imaging what content would go where, what would be most helpful, and how someone might engage with Food52 on Magic Leap One. What they found was that by allowing images and videos on recipes to become objects that could be placed spatially with universal iconography indicating that these objects were interactive, their website quickly became spatial. As they explored this new world of spatial opportunities, adding a virtual timer and interactive 3D visualizations of cooking tools were simple-yet-impactful enhancements to the user experience.

The Food52 website on Magic Leap One makes a hands-free cooking experience a reality and brings to life the kitchen of the future. With spatially placed ingredient lists, step-by-step instructions, video walkthroughs, and photos of the finished dish, users have all of the benefits of a web-based recipe without having to constantly touch your phone or tablet. Now Food52 readers can seamlessly look up from chopping vegetables and have the next preparation step at the ready, floating at eye level.

“We wanted to stretch the imagination of our community of home cooks, and I think we’ve achieved that today,” stated Mr. Charles.