Valio and Telia inspire bakers with augmented reality
The coronavirus pandemic has made baking and cooking significantly more popular. At the same time, society has taken a digital leap. Baking and cooking enthusiasts now live in a digital world, and Valio and Telia want to inspire them through augmented reality. Valio is bringing an AR (augmented reality) experience to its bakery products, which will let you check out recipes via your smartphone even while you’re shopping.
“Food has long been one of the most popular forms of content genres online and in social media, and our latest trend review shows that digital life will continue to influence our relationships with food and food brands. Being an exceptional year, 2020 got a great deal of first-time home chefs and bakers to take up arms at the pots and pans. We are combining baking and augmented reality, because we want to help people make themselves and each other happy with home-made pastries. That will be even easier now”, says Valio’s Head of Content Marketing Aino Laakso.
The new augmented reality experience is produced by Valio, the technology platform is provided by Telia, and the experience was created by Make Helsinki, a content producer of XR Nation’s ecosystem, which is responsible for Telia's augmented reality content creators. Valio's flavored bakery products have an AR code that grants access to the experience and instructions for utilizing the augmented reality content. The AR experience suggests three topical and tantalizing recipe tips for each product.
What can I make from this – how it works
The AR experience will first become available to Valio's flavored quarks and, during the spring, the experience will expand to other flavored bakery products, such as chocolate and caramel cream. Valio is also launching a new type of bakery product which will be launched in May and will also have an AR experience. This content will be updated frequently since baking is very much tied to the holidays and seasons.
“It is worth checking out the AR recipes again, and you should do it in the store, so that you can buy all the ingredients you need right away. Using this is very easy, you don’t need to install anything. Just open your smartphone’s web browser”, says Aino Laakso.
The content for Telia's AR by Telia platform was created by XR Nation's ecosystem partner Make Helsinki Oy. The starting points for the implementation were ease of use, having attractive visuals and being easy to update.
“Make Helsinki did excellent work. Curved packages were a challenge that needed to be solved for the solution work well. We can update the content in-house with an editor that Make Helsinki tailored for our ease of use”, says Aino Laakso.
New opportunities through augmented reality
Pioneering companies are relying on new technology. Virtual and augmented reality solutions are expected to bring completely new opportunities, especially in the retail sector. Fast-growing 5G technology provides a real-time AR experience with no delay.
“Augmented reality can give a physical product or service a digital level that can add significantly to its interactivity and create additional value. Digital solutions for cooking, as with Valio, as a great example of this, and we are sure to see more of the same in Finland,” says Janne Timonen, Senior Business Manager at Telia.
“The biggest changes in people’s daily lives in this decade will be the way we consume digital content. Various solutions to augmented reality are becoming more common, and we are beginning to see a shift from a two-dimensional approach to a three-dimensional one. Augmented reality experiences using a mobile phone are only the first step, and they are easily shown to already benefit companies' business”, says Teemu Ollilainen, Project Manager and Business Director of the Valio project at XR Nation.
For more information contact:
Teemu Ollilainen
Phone: 040 158 2089
Email: teemu@xrnation.com
Do you want to try the experience? Watch and enjoy!