Telefónica has again teamed up with renowned Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, a Telefónica ambassador since 2010, to create an app designed to help users cook professional dishes at home. The free Android and iOS app, called simply Adrià, offers step-by-step guides to 31 three-course menus eaten by staff at the El Bulli restaurant. It also includes advice from the chef and his team to help users plan menus, buy ingredients and optimize the time they spend cooking, as well as a personal area where users can save favorite menus and shopping lists and share photos of their creations.

Tarifica’s Take

In this time of forced home confinement and fear of illness, there is certainly an appetite for public-spirited gestures from mobile operators—as well as an appetite for restaurant-quality meals in the absence of visitable restaurants. Spanish operator Telefónica has cleverly employed its brand ambassador Ferran Adrià, one of the world’s most famous and innovative chefs, to not only put his name on a food-oriented app but to provide the substance of the offering—that is, rich, value-added instruction and guidance for the purpose of creating high-grade meals under challenging conditions.

We think this will be appealing to the targeted audience, Spanish families and food enthusiasts who appreciate this kind of cuisine, and it will likely contribute to solidifying good impressions of Telefónica in their minds. Under the stay-at-home orders in Spain—a country particularly hard-hit by Covid-19—people are missing their usual comforts, and helping to assuage their feelings is bound to have a positive effect in terms of customer relations. The app’s program is well-thought-out, including not just recipes and cooking instructions but tangible guidance on how to source ingredients and plan menus. In short, an offering that is sensitive to the times, to the particular cultural proclivities of a target audience and to the way people interact with it is very likely to be a winner. This one may not drive massive data consumption, but by marrying one of the newest, most cutting-edge technologies, mobile telecom, with one of mankind’s most ancient practices, cooking, it should have a salutary psychological effect in this trying time.