Amazon is now an angel investor in a company led by one of its former employees. Foodista, which is trying to create an authoritative wiki for recipes, raised a $550,000 series A funding from Amazon and a group of local Seattle angel investors. CEO and founder Barnaby Dorfman was formerly a vice president at Amazon’s A9 search engine, before he left in 2006.
Foodista is targeting the growing ranks of food bloggers to contribute recipes and use Foodista as a marketing vehicle to find new readers. To that end it has organized the first International Food Blogger Conference in Seattle in May, which is already sold out (Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl is keynoting).
As I described Foodista in my initial review:
It is a Wikipedia for food. Each recipe can be collaboratively edited and improved. Scrumptious photos for each dish are pulled in from Flickr, and descriptions are pulled in from Wikipedia itself. You can add or remove ingredients, see the edit history, or add a comment to each page.
The site is built entirely on Amazon Web services (EC2, S3, and Simple DB) and every ingredient, recipe, technique, and cooking appliance is treated as structured data that links to every other mention of that same item on the site, which makes exploring a lot easier. The site’s traffic still barely registers on many measurement services, but is showing some traction.
Commenting as an everyday foodie – I congratulate the Foodista team for securing some early funding. Having been a user of Foodista since beta, I have seen the website developed into something great and it is used in my house in tandem with allrecipes.com (which is an entirely different site in my books). Congrats again, look forward to seeing greater things on Foodista! Food bloggers unite!!
been following this one for a few months. nice clean design and good photos (seems to heavily leverage flickr–clever). wiki makes sense for recipes in terms of link structure and user-generation of content.
however, the recipe space is pretty crowded, and the usual suspects show up in searches for recipes (allrecipes, epicurious, etc). i think this will live or die by SEO, like most content-driven websites.
Jambalaya rocks with a simple substitution of Arborio rice in place of long grain….sort of a Cajun Paella ….Jambaella?? recipe here:
http://www.exam...ood-of-the-Gods
A heavy backing by a company like Amazon gives a tremendous visibility.. though the concept may not be as NEW.. but there is no one stop shop for online recipes. They have the room to become the youtube of videos or search of google.
Good work Barnaby
.
Wonder what the valuation and term sheet looked like..
Disclosure: I am the founder of Open Source Food a recipe site which was acquired this year and rebranded as http://www.nibbledish.com
I think a “recipes wiki” is something that sounds great on paper, but it goes against the whole idea of cooking. Cooking is about infinite variations and infinite taste palates, it’s not about one recipe for spaghetti to rule them all.
I know, because initially a “recipe wiki” was my idea for Open Source Food – that’s what I wanted it to be. I soon realised that it made no sense.
Foodista looks less like a community and more like an aggregator – and the fact that they are just pulling in photos from flickr means that they are just there as superfluous decoration: the picture you are seeing is not of the actual recipe you are reading. Simple example:
http://www.food...55Y4X/spaghetti
Recipe is for spaghetti, the first photo is of tagliatelle. That’s the problem when you’re just pulling in data from all over the shop.
Anyway, congrats on getting funded, Foodista. Hope the money gets put to good use!
Cheers
Jon
Completely agree with you.
Just checked out Nibbledish for the first time too. Looks like a cool site, but wondered why you run ads on the site, but then not label them as ads. Seems a bit deceptive to readers to include links that appear to be part of the site without an ads by foundry label
Davis – thanks for your comments. Although I’m no longer in charge of advertising on the site:
1) all text ads are clearly marked with a “sponsored links” mark.
2) all image ads are as you would see them on other web properties (i.e. no “this is an ad” text, but it should be obvious as they, well, look like ads).
Not sure where the confusion is, but if you have suggestions as to how we can make the ads seem more like ads, I’m all ears.
Hi Jon,
Try searching for the word egg and then taking a look at the text ads that show up. I don’t see anywhere that it says sponsored links or advertisement, although there is a “what’s this” link that you can click on to find out more about Yahoo!’s ad program. From a reader’s standpoint, these ads look like they are part of the site because they include things like Egg recipes, but readers won’t know that they’re ads until they actually click on them. It’d be great if you could include a sponsored listing at the top of them like most sites do.
Agreed. Good looking site. I think we can work together on a couple projects. I’ll ping you via your site.
I am looking forward to this. Should be quite interesting to see what other people do when they make their favorite recipes and foods.
If you haven’t read the Foodista blog… High quality and the whole thing goes way beyond recipes while staying true to the recipe “promise”. It’s about food and enjoying it.
Way to go Barnaby and team! Definitely well deserved. You’re setting a fine example for us young pup startups.
Last year over 60 million people searched for recipes online which amounted to 6 billion searches. I’m not sure we need another ‘community’ for foodies which is why my company RecipeBridge took the vertical search engine approach. We focus on what I believe the majority of users are doing: searching for recipes to cook as opposed to leaving comments, rating recipes, or writing up how they changed things.
I’ve never heard of Foodista before, but just checked it out and think it needs a bit more work before I’ll be prepared to ditch my current recipe sites. The biggest feature I noticed missing was the ability to search by ingredient. I like to look in my fridge to see what the next thing to expire is and then build my meals around that. It allows you to save on spoilage and find interesting recipes that you wouldn’t know about otherwise. While I appreciate some of the education components of the Foodista site without better filtering technology, it will be hard for them to stand out.
Recipe search is definitely a huge area. It seems finding recipes in general isn’t difficult, but finding test kitchen tested recipes from known sources can be.
At Project Foodie (http://www.projectfoodie.com) we’ve taken a more structured approach – we provide search and access to recipes from specific publication sources (magazines, newspapers, cookbooks, tv shows) combined with a recipe box and tagging. Rather than searching bunches of individual magazine sites, on Project Foodie, all the top magazine recipes are in one spot.
That could be a big hit
Alright… this is great news! Proof once again that the food space lives on and can continue to evolve and grow. Even large brands are rebranding content to appeal to a new set of users. Kind of like same food, different restaurant.
Regardless, I wish you guys all the best with your site. Food is probably one of the most interesting and underrated spaces around… but it’s one of most profitable. Even in a recession, we still eat!
@Yongfook – never got to congratulate you on your acquisition. Looks like a good fit.
[shameless plug alert] If you haven’t voted in this year’s webbys.. check out BakeSpace (Social Networking Category) … I know, the horror!
Our cupcakes are that good.
User-generated content in micro-publishing categories is definitely where the online publishing industry is heading. This reminds me a lot of the online guitar database at Fretbase (http://www.fretbase.com).
Congrats to our Seattle cooking site friends at Foodista!
At BigOven.com, while authors can edit their own recipes easily, you cannot easily edit someone else’s recipe, and that’s by design. As YongFook put well, we agree that it’s kind of hard to define what is the single, canonical “fettucini alfredo” recipe. Even master chefs will get into heated arguments about the classics, let alone more complex dishes.
Instead, to help try to reduce the complexity a bit, we chose to add a feature that we call “recipelinks”, in addition to tagging/folksonomy features.
RecipeLinks let users create directional links between recipes, letting you add things like “if you have leftovers of this recipe, make this other recipe”, or, “a variation on this recipe is”, or “I prefer making it this way”, or “I recommend serving it with this recipe”, etc. We just celebrated our 400,000th member, and are happy with the progress over the past couple of years.
Should be interesting to see as this area continues to expand!