App developers serve up Khmer cuisine to thriving digital recipe market

App developers serve up Khmer cuisine to thriving digital recipe market

As Cambodians increasingly embrace the digital age, homegrown developers are creating Khmer recipe apps to share the nation’s traditional dishes.

No longer solely reliant on word of mouth, Cambodian food is now reaching the masses through this new digital outlet. The hundreds of thousands of downloads from Google Play and the Apple App Store have created an appetite for a potential, ongoing advertising revenue stream among the community of neophyte Khmer recipe app pioneers.

On Google Play for Android, the app “Khmer Cooking Recipe” is leading the pack having recorded more than100,000 downloads. The app also has an impressive 4.6 out of possible 5-star rating and boasts in excess of 280 reviewers, with one user remarking, “Better than any Khmer food book”.

Another reviewer posted, “If you love eating Khmer food, but you don’t really know how to [prepare it] or what ingredients [are] used [in its] cooking, this is the app you need to get. It shows you all the ingredients [you need] and also has some videos showing how to cook it. Yummy!”

Lagging behind on downloads, but only slightly so on ratings, the app “Khmer Cooking” rates a respectable 4.2 stars out of 5.

Although some users said the app was “excellent”, one reviewer left a one-star rating, remarking that the number of pop-up adverts made the app unusable.

Meanwhile on Apple’s App Store, while the app “Khmer Cooking” has yet to garner sufficient downloads for review, its numbers are increasing daily and the rising number of Khmer recipe apps is evidence that developers in the Kingdom are looking for their slice of the pie.

While cooking app users browse them for new ideas on what to make for dinner, developers are drawn to the niche as a means of making money because popular apps can mean big business.

Leading mobile platforms developer Tekrevol says top apps have the potential to pull in billions of dollars in revenue.

“However, apps that [actually] manage to do this are quite low in number. So, it’s an incredibly difficult exercise to provide a number on how much money an app can make considering the fact that there are [such] a large number of them and there is an incredible amount of variance in the amount of revenue they manage to churn for their developers.”

It says, however, that achieving and maintaining a position in the top 200 in app store downloads can earn developers upwards of $82,500 daily.

“But [when] you widen that bracket and look at the figures for the top 800, the daily revenue drops down to around $3,500,” it added.

“However, the app market is registering continued growth and industry analysts predict that this [trend] is going to remain strong [well into] the future as well,” it said.

Indeed, the recipe app market in particular is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 16 percent between 2019 and 2027, according to marketing consultancy organisation Absolute Market Insights. This annual growth rate is being spurred on by developers who continuously expand app features and capabilities.

AMI said tech-savvy millennials (born between 1979 and 1995) and Generation Z (born between 1996 and 2010) increasingly use digital to perform their daily activities.

“Considering this shift in trends, companies in the recipe app market are integrating different add-on features, including automated grocery lists, into their offerings. The automated grocery list feature converts saved recipes into shopping lists through a collaborative manner, empowering its users with ease in cooking meals by eliminating the hassle of manually generating shopping lists,” it said.

AMI notes that further tech advancements are also being integrated. Among these are “snap n cook”, a feature that enables users to click images of an ingredient that artificial intelligence algorithms then analyse to generate recommended and relevant recipes. Built-in food intelligence can also create personalised recommendations for individual users.

In Cambodia, a mobile-first country with a young population and a unique cuisine, bringing the Kingdom’s food to the world could be a recipe for success. Khmer Times