I used emoji to order groceries

Generally, reverting back to pictographs to communicate embarrasses me.

I’ve resisted emoji in most of my texts and social media posts over the years, but last week, while working remotely in Santiago, Chile, I encountered a moment where emoji was a lifesaver. 

I was ordering groceries through the South American delivery app Rappi (it’s like Amazon and Uber Eat and Lime rolled into one) when I quickly realized my Spanish vocabulary wasn’t as robust as it’d need to be. The app is very much programmed in Spanish, so typing in English doesn’t yield much.

Normally one to scoff at a feature that uses emoji (like Twitter or Bing searches for an “LOL” face), I found myself happily clicking icons of different fruits and vegetables, selecting what I wanted to put in my virtual cart that would then get picked up by a shopper at an IRL grocery store and delivered to me via motorcycle at my apartment entrance. I always mix up my “lima” with my “limón” in Spanish without a trip to Google Translate, but I didn’t need to add that step. Clearly the yellow-looking lemon is a lemon. The power of pictures! 

Even with words that I know, like “pan” (bread), it was helpful to just click the loaf icon and then see all the different bread options. After I set up an account and plugged in my delivery address, I picked a store to “shop” from. When I selected a big supermarket, the emoji list option automatically came up within the search section for the Chile-based app (Rappi is also in Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay). A pictorial list of groceries came up, presumably for common searches. It was mostly fruit, like bananas, grapes, pears, and pineapples, and items like chicken, cheese, and bread.

We reached out to Rappi to find out more about the emoji search — including when it was added as a feature and how popular it is — but no word back yet.

Other grocery apps have seen the emoji light, like one for the British grocery chain Iceland, which lets you search for items to buy for delivery based on an emoji, too. You simply plug your emoji directly into the search bar. I tried this method out in Rappi and sure enough, searching for a chocolate bar icon brought up nearby stores selling chocolate products. 

In the U.S., emoji has yet to infiltrate any mainstream delivery apps, but some emoji food menus have been spotted. For an app like Amazon, emoji-based searches could simplify the search process, and make shopping more accessible across the world. 

I may never use my words again.