Yhteishyvä Ruoka is a new recipe application that weaves inspiration, meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking seamlessly together.

Provided by Finland’s largest retailer, the app changes how people plan meals and shop for groceries at a national scale. By connecting trusted food content directly to planning, shopping, and cooking, Yhteishyvä Ruoka makes people’s everyday life run smoothly – and at the same time, strengthens customer engagement across the S Group ecosystem.

The world is full of recipes. Food content flows through all imaginable channels, yet everyday meal decisions remain surprisingly demanding. Inspiration, meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking often exist in separate places, creating friction in one of life’s most repeated routines.

From S Group’s perspective, the digital ecosystem had grown complex. Strong services and channels existed side by side, but without a clear connective layer between media, food commerce, and everyday use. While Yhteishyvä.fi and the print magazine formed a solid foundation for recipes, they largely lived apart from everyday decision-making and grocery shopping.

This created a clear gap: plenty of inspiration, but no coherent service supporting the full journey from idea to table. With its nationwide retail presence and trusted food content, S Group was well-positioned to close this gap.

Research into people’s habits revealed that the need for food planning grows with the pressure of everyday life. The busier life gets, the more people plan, or would like to plan – not because planning is enjoyable, but because it reduces stress. Families plan meals to survive the week. More flexible households plan less, yet still crave inspiration and variety.

Across these differences, the same pain points emerged:

→ Meals easily become repetitive
→ Inspiration is hard to name, yet deeply valued
→ Meal planning and grocery shopping feel fragmented
→ Time – especially mental time – is scarce.

People did not want rigid systems, but gentle guidance. They wanted to plan meals just enough, plan together with friends and family, and let inspiration guide decisions when time allows. Meal planning also needed to be more than a routine –  a source of joy and inspiration.

Through its media brand Yhteishyvä, S Group has supported Finnish households with food, home, and lifestyle content for over 120 years. Combined with S Group’s access to shopping data and a nationwide retail ecosystem, this created a promising starting point.

By giving recipes a new home and connecting them naturally to meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking, S Group was able to support people’s everyday life in a more meaningful way – while strengthening customer loyalty, smoothing paths between media and food commerce, and opening new doors for content partnerships.

With reliable, high-quality recipes and deep food expertise, S Group was perfectly positioned to create Finland’s best everyday food service: one that feels helpful, human, and quietly intelligent.

Yhteishyvä recipes are developed in the S Group test kitchen. They are carefully planned, tested, and refined. They focus on seasonal vegetables and domestic ingredients, offering ideas, inspiration, and new flavours for both everyday meals and special occasions. The ingredients for the recipes are available at Prisma and S-market.

S Group’s recipes inspire, support everyday life, and connect people.

AI was used throughout the project as an exploration tool – not as a single feature. It became a way to investigate uncertainty, test assumptions, and learn where automation genuinely made a difference.

One of the hardest challenges was connecting free-form recipe content with real products on store shelves. Ingredients described in natural language needed to be interpreted and aligned with changing assortments and imperfect data, while still feeling clear and trustworthy to users.

Addressing this required more than a single AI model. The solution evolved into an agentic AI workflow, where multiple AI-driven steps work together to interpret ingredients, propose matches, validate results, and improve relevance as data and availability change.

AI enabled us to explore this problem space rapidly. It allowed us to sketch different approaches to ingredient interpretation, matching strategies, and relevance ranking.

Some of the AI experiments became part of the live service, while others, such as conversational interfaces and free-form search, helped us shape the design direction, even though they were not taken further. These learnings led us to focus AI beneath the surface, strengthening reliability and consistency rather than adding visible AI features.

In the live service, AI quietly supports everyday use through:

→ More consistent ingredient data and reliable product matches
→ Product suggestions for new or previously unmatched ingredients
→ Product suggestions that improve over time
→ Finding similar recipes based on meaning, not just keywords
→ Clear, step-by-step recipe instructions for cooking mode
→ Extracting colours from images to support visual consistency.

Beyond the product itself, AI supported our work by speeding up code reviews, helping transcribe and summarise interviews, enabling quick prototyping, and improving metadata consistency at scale.

Overall, AI was applied with a learning-first mindset, focusing on clarity, robustness, and user trust.

One team, one table

Design, content, and technology worked as one cross-functional team alongside the client – literally around one table. Development followed an iterative, full-stack approach with regular user interviews, fast iterations, and close stakeholder collaboration. This enabled quick decisions, shared ownership, and a deep understanding of both user needs and business goals.

Giving recipes a new home

The strategic ambition behind Yhteishyvä Ruoka was not to create yet another recipe app, but to give recipe content a home – a central place from which inspiration, meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking could be naturally bridged. The potential lay in owning the full user journey, something no existing service had done in a high-quality, end-to-end way.

From an ecosystem perspective, recipes offered a rare connective element. They could link media, food commerce, and everyday life.

Yhteishyvä’s high-quality recipes provided a strong foundation for the new application. Volume and variation could be expanded through an open content mindset, including partnerships and influencer collaborations.

The strategic goal was to build a coherent customer experience and, at the same time, a flexible capability to use recipe content across different contexts within the S Group universe.

Fusion of fun and functionality

The creative idea behind Yhteishyvä Ruoka was to spark the joy of cooking while supporting it with smooth, co-operative tools. This starts from a simple understanding of food and its role in people’s lives: while cooking is part of everyday routine, it is also about pleasure, care, and celebration.

Based on this thinking, Yhteishyvä Ruoka brings together:

→ Trusted, high-quality recipes
→ Practical tools that support meal planning
→ A smooth connection to grocery shopping
→ An experience designed to help users focus on cooking.

The core principle is gentle guiding. The app helps users plan meals just enough, stay flexible, and move effortlessly between inspiration, meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking. Visual richness tickles curiosity, while smart minimalism reduces cognitive load.

Fom inspiration to the kitchen

Yhteishyvä Ruoka supports the full food journey, from the first spark of inspiration to the moment food is on the plate. The experience adapts to different situations, not assuming everyone likes the same spaghetti bolognese.

Content was not something to compromise on. Food decisions are deeply personal, and trust is built recipe by recipe.

A strong editorial foundation ensures reliability and consistency. Professional editors and an in-house test kitchen stand behind every recipe, all of which follow Yhteishyvä’s recipe promise: all recipes are high-quality, thoroughly tested, and designed for everyday cooking.

The offering balances variety and familiarity, from seasonal produce and family-friendly meals to affordable options, vegetarian and vegan recipes, and mouth-watering baking content.

Behind the scenes, clear metadata, an annual content rhythm, and a modular front page ensure a balanced mix of evergreen favourites and timely inspiration. Content is updated daily, with new recipes and collections published weekly.

Meal planning can be light or detailed, depending on the situation. Users can save recipes into folders, build meal plans gradually, filter suggestions, or add appetising finds directly to a plan.

Plans are not limited to one meal a day. Breakfasts, lunches, snacks, or other meals can be added alongside dinners, supporting a more holistic view of everyday eating.

Ready-made menus and curated weekly plans created by food professionals offer an easy starting point. The planner can also be used for special situations, such as weekend trips to a cottage, where planning ahead helps everything run more smoothly.

Recipes, folders, and plans can be shared with family and friends, making meal planning a shared activity rather than a solitary task. This way, meal planning and cooking become something people coordinate, discuss, and enjoy together.

Yhteishyvä Ruoka creates a clear bridge between recipes and grocery shopping.

Every ingredient in every recipe is available in S Group stores. Thanks to AI-based product mapping, recipe ingredients are mapped to real products and can be transferred directly to either the S-ostoslista app for in-store shopping or the S-kaupat app for online orders.

Users can adjust portion sizes, view prices, choose their preferred product variants, and select the store assortment they plan to shop in. This ensures that ingredient lists reflect real availability, whether shopping in a physical store or ordering groceries home.

Grocery shopping becomes a natural continuation of inspiration, not a separate task.

In the app, the recipes are presented in a dedicated cooking mode designed for hands-on use. The screen stays on, instructions are broken into clear steps, and users can move between steps using voice control, without touching the screen with flour-dusted hands.

Recipes are structured into logical steps using language models, making them easier to follow while cooking.

This hands-free experience reduces friction and allows users to focus on what matters most: cooking itself.

→ recipes you love
→ meal plans that make your life flow
→ stores that have you covered
→ cooking instructions you can trust, and...
→ the people who make your meals matter.

SOK

Asta Kujala, Sandra Sundbäck, Satu Lindfors, Katja Bäcksbacka, Outi Vartiainen, Sonja Kallio, Tuuli Kanerva, 
Anton Sinelnikov, Essi Ovaska, Vesa Ahtiainen (Solita), Camilla Leisti, Aku Kotkavuo, Mikko Hyytiäinen

Reaktor

Sami Vuoritie, Mirjami Haimelin, Elina Pallasvirta, Ville Heikkilä, Markus Ylisiurunen, Kim Olenius, Peter Lindberg, Antti Holvikari, Jukka-Pekka Seppänen, Pauliina Paynter, Katri Blomster, Mikko Latva-Käyrä, Juha Kokko

Competition categories


Best Digital Service, Best UX, Best Visual Design, Best Implementation, Best Use of AI, Best Service Design

Download the app

App Store
Google Play