Ben Jabbawy, Founder of Grocers List
At Blueberri, we talk a lot about tech partnerships: what they are, why they matter, and how creators can use them to unlock new revenue. But sometimes, the best way to understand where the industry is going is to meet the people building it.
Recipes & Roadmaps is a new interview series spotlighting the founders behind the platforms shaping the future of food content. These companies may be new on the scene, but they’re already making waves. And their stories—about building, adapting, and imagining what’s possible—start with a simple question:
What would food creators build if the tools were finally made for them?
Let’s find out.
Ben Jabbawy is no stranger to the tech industry. Before launching Grocers List, he spent a decade building and scaling Privy, a marketing platform for e-commerce stores that was acquired by Shopify in 2021. But it wasn’t until a post-acquisition break, and a lot of home cooking, that he realized how broken the food creator tech stack really is.
“When I saw how successful food creators were despite the tools they had, I knew something was off,” Ben explained. “The workflows weren’t built for them. The software wasn’t intuitive. And the friction between their content and their audiences’ intent? Way too high.”
That insight sparked Grocers List, a platform built specifically to help food creators bridge the gap between recipe inspiration and real-time action. You’ve seen it: comment-for-DM flows that connect directly to Amazon checkouts, seamless affiliate integrations, and zero-maintenance automations.
“You have creators publishing daily, driving huge traffic, and earning meaningful revenue. But most of the software they rely on doesn’t serve their real needs. That’s the opportunity.”
Ben brought some hard-won lessons from e-commerce into the food world:
Every extra click in a user journey means 30% drop-off.
The easier it is to try, buy, and get value from a tool, the more likely it is to stick.
Support is not a cost center. It’s part of the product.
That ethos now powers Grocers List’s approach to building tools that actually make creators’ lives easier, not harder.
Grocers List is most known for its DM automation flows. But their secret sauce is Shop the Recipe™, a feature that condenses the multi-step chaos of grocery shopping into a single click.
Here’s how it works:
A follower comments on a reel.
Grocers List sends them a DM with a recipe link.
With one click, they can auto-fill their cart on Amazon with all the ingredients.
“We’re seeing 9% conversion rates on Shop the Recipe links,” Ben shared. “And creators earn full affiliate credit, hands-off.”
That’s the key: the platform makes monetization easy, passive, and scalable, without adding to the creator’s workload.
Ben’s building something new. And this time, he’s starting with the needs of food creators first.
In this interview, we dig into how Grocers List works, how it’s shifting what monetization looks like for creators, and what’s coming next.
Here’s our full conversation.
In business, a mentor once told me that if you have an idea, and you can get to 10 customers, you can get to 100. If you can get to 100, you can get to 1,000 and so on. For me, getting to your first 10 paying customers you have never met before, is a huge milestone.
I’m thankful that in the food creator space, if you drive value, word spreads quickly. So the team hustles hard to respond quickly to support conversations, even after putting the kids to sleep, I pick those up. You have to do things personally and as a team that just do not scale.
I’m proud of how we’ve done this to date, and I think its resonating with the market. Then I look at things from a ‘scale’ perspective. We’ve now sent over 20M DMs for creators on the platform. Sending over 2M each month now. I’ll never forget when we hit our first 1M send month.
Given most of our creators make their living off traffic to their websites, it feels really good to be helping creators grow revenue directly.
We are constantly shipping new products, quickly. Comment for DM. Save to email. Deep links for Amazon. Meal plans with Amazon grocery integration. So much more.
This is a HUGE summer for Grocers List. I can’t share much, but you’re going to see some big announcements on partnerships with some of the ad networks, and an entirely new product launch this fall to help food creators earn more revenue.
SOURCE: @grocerlist Instagram
Focus on the two assets you can truly own on the internet: a website + an email list.
Building a social presence is great, but at the end of the day, algorithms come and go, so making your email list and website your anchors will drive long-term business success.
The more we can align ourselves to the success of our creators’ businesses, the more trust we will create with creators on the platform. We’ll do that by staying focused only on food creators, so we don’t get distracted. We’ll do that by building things that have a clear impact on traffic, affiliate sales, or revenue. And we’ll do that by offering amazing support.
Today, we already have 1K of the top food creators on the platform. I hope over the coming years, if we stay true to this mission, that number will be 10,000+.
I have Middle Eastern roots, so we tend to eat a lot of Middle Eastern cuisine like Pargiyot and Red Rice and Ottolenghi’s Lamb Kofta with Corn, Zucchini & Roasted Carrot Salad and Homemade Hummus
Our favorite reaction is ‘wow’. It's what we strive for. And in most cases, when creators go live seamlessly within minutes and have an awesome support interaction, the excitement is palpable.
My dream collaborator (dead, alive, or fictional) is…
My Grandma Rose
A quote or mantra I come back to often is…
If there’s a will, there’s a way.
Recipes & Roadmaps
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