Style to Taste

Everyone has their own taste. K-Citymarket has the range to cater to it.

Now, the Finnish hypermarket chain has created a new way to inspire people to follow theirs. Style to Taste, launched in Finland under the name Maku Match, is a digital service that turns one expression of personal taste into another: your personal style into food inspiration.

Users simply take or upload a photo of themselves. The service interprets visual cues in their style and creates an individual taste profile, then connects it to food inspiration and recipes from the retailer's extensive recipe bank.

The inspiration doesn't end at the result. Recipes connect to ingredients available from K-Citymarket, creating a direct path from personal discovery to products and shopping.

The idea appears to have struck a chord. Since launch, the service has already been used more than 15,000 times to turn people's personal style into food inspiration.

Style to Taste was created as part of K-Citymarket's new brand positioning, "Sinulla on makua. Cittari hoitaa", or "You've Got Taste. We've Got You." Rather than defining what good taste is, K-Citymarket celebrates everyone having their own, and uses its broad range to help people follow it.

From Style to Taste

A person's clothes, colours and visual choices become the starting point for an entirely different kind of inspiration: food.

Behind the playful idea is research into crossmodal correspondences: connections our brains make between different senses. Studies have found that people associate visual characteristics such as colours, shapes and textures with different tastes (Lee & Spence, 2022).

The service uses these visual-to-taste associations as its starting point. AI interprets cues in the user's photo and translates them into a personal taste profile, which is then connected with relevant recipes from the retailer's extensive recipe bank.

The aim isn't to predict what someone already likes, but to use their style as an unexpected starting point for discovering something new.

And the experience doesn't end with inspiration. The recipes connect to products available from K-Citymarket, creating a direct route from discovery to shopping the ingredients.

K-Citymarket served the matches for real.

Creators with distinctly different personal styles were invited to experience their matches live. Each was photographed, given a personal taste profile through the service, and served a dish inspired by their style and made entirely from products available at K-Citymarket.

Different styles produced different profiles, ingredients and dishes, turning the idea behind the service into something people could actually see, and eat.

The resulting dishes were as different as the people who inspired them, while every ingredient came from the same place: K-Citymarket's range.

The experience became creator and social content, while Style to Taste rolled out across K-Citymarket's own digital and social channels, inviting everyone to discover what their own style might taste like.

A hypermarket for 5.6 million tastes.

Style to Taste is one of the first major activations of K-Citymarket's new "You've Got Taste. We've Got You." positioning, built on a simple idea: there are as many tastes as there are people.

"Everyone has their own taste, and we think that's something worth celebrating. Our role isn't to tell people what to like, but to offer the choice and inspiration to follow their own. Style to Taste is a new way of bringing that belief to life," says Henrik Wahlfors, Marketing Director at K-Citymarket.

For K-Citymarket, the idea also turns one of the fundamental strengths of a hypermarket into something personal.

The retailer already had the ingredients: an extensive recipe bank and a vast range of food and non-food products. Style to Taste created a completely new way into them.

Instead of starting with "What should I cook?", people can start with something they already know intimately: themselves. Their style becomes inspiration, inspiration becomes a recipe, and the recipe creates a direct path towards the products needed to make it.

And because K-Citymarket's range extends far beyond food, that inspiration can continue beyond the recipe, into the products used to cook, serve and create the experience around it.

The breadth of K-Citymarket's range isn't simply something Style to Taste demonstrates. It's what makes the idea possible.

A broad range isn't valuable simply because there is more to choose from. It is valuable because more people can find something that feels like them. Or discover something they didn't know they would like.

And as more of our choices are influenced by the same trends, recommendations and algorithms, the agency behind the idea believes personal taste is only becoming more important.