Now the two have decided to merge and build the mother of all delivery and takeout portals. The companies said combined GrubHub and Seamless will have a presence in more than 500 cities and more than 20,000 restaurant clients. In 2012, the companies said they processed a combined $875 million in gross food sales, bringing in $100 million in revenue (though neither has taken the unusual step of accepting Bitcoin as payment like competitor Foodler.)

The companies didn’t reveal any financial terms of the deal, nor did they unveil a name for the combined the company. GrubHub co-founder and CEO Matt Maloney will become CEO of the merged entity, while Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky will become President.

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Pinterest is launching three distinct types of pins, with one type each for food, retail products, and movies. The new format will only work with items pinned from the launch partner sites, but the number of partners is wide-reaching, and will grow. If you click on a food pin, it will now include the ingredient list and relevant information below the photo, auto-generated from the original site. Product photos will show where you can find the item for sale, and the movie pins will show information about the movie such as its rating, cast and release date.

The list of brands participating in the launch demonstrates the strong interest from U.S. retailers in getting on board with Pinterest. Some of the launch partners include: eBay, Etsy, Home Depot, Neiman Marcus, Overstock, REI, Sephora, Sony, Target, Urban Outfitters, Wal-Mart, Bon Appetit, Epicurious, Martha Stewart Living, Whole Foods, Netflix, Rotten Tomatoes, and many others. Companies who want to be included in the program can apply on Pinterest’s developer page.

A Pinterest representative sought to emphasize that the new pins are not a form of advertising, but are instead supposed to make pins more “actionable,” a term the company has been using for a while now, including in our interview with CEO Ben Silbermann just last week.

“We want to make pinning actionable,” he told us at the time. “Our focus has been to become a very valuable service.”

One major complaint with Pinterest, which has given an advantage to sites like Wanelo or Nasty Gal, is that users frequently share or re-pin the same photo thousands of times, but when you actually click the photo to see where it came from the link is broken.

If more and more companies and popular blogs integrate their photos of inventory with Pinterest under the new pin structure, it could make items more trackable on the site — which would be handy for consumers and crucial if Pinterest wants to eventually profit from the traffic it generates.

And it’s not an insignificant amount of web traffic. While Pinterest doesn’t officially release any stats, a recent ComScore report put the number of users at more than 48 million unique visitors globally, and a February Pew report on social media put the percentage of online adults using Pinterest at 15 percent, which is slightly less than the 16 percent on Twitter, and more than the 13 percent on Instagram — and far more than the 6 percent on Yahoo’s apparent new friend Tumblr.

A company spokesperson said Pinterest is currently not profiting from the new integration with brands. But the strong interest on the part of the companies and the launch of a tech platform to support them paves the way for making money in the future. After all, Pinterest just raised $200 million in new funding — it has to be looking to make money at some point.

It’s an inevitable move for Pinterest to accelerate its growth, as we noted in a story on the small team’s unique symbiosis between design and engineering. But the site needs to make sure it crafts a business model that fits with its content, much as Twitter has built up promoted tweets.

Pinterest is still in the early days of that growth, but all sorts of e-commerce companies, from the startup Wanelo to behemoth Amazon, will be watching closely as this unfolds.

Updated at 9:14 PM to note that the new recipe pins will show the full ingredient list, not the full recipe.

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TV shows Top Chef and America’s Test Kitchen have both launched their own online cooking programs, and we’ve even see the emergence of the first online professional culinary school. Now a San Francisco startup called Feast is taking a tech startup’s approach to the cooking school.

Feast co-founder and CEO David Spinks doesn’t have a cooking background. Instead he’s online community developer that has created or managed the community portals for the LeWeb conferences, Zaarly, u30pro, BlogDash and Scribnia. He even created a meta-community for community managers called, you guessed it, TheCommunityManager. But after he did some consulting work for online learning startup Udemy, helping it develop its community strategy, Spinks got the idea for Feast.

Spinks said he wanted to apply the same online education methods underlying teaching sites like Udemy and Coursera to create a platform for cooking lessons. In addition, Spinks wanted to anchor those classes with a strong community, not only to address the inevitable questions and problems that emerge when trying to prepare a dish, but to keep students interested and engaged.

Spinks added that he didn’t want to create something dull or overly academic either – not the cooking equivalent of a coding course.

“We wanted to take the entertainment value you get on television, but create a format where you can actually learn,” Spinks said. “There is a problem with the Food Network. It’s entertaining you, but they’re not really teaching you how to cook. They’re selling you a lifestyle. We’re actually trying to get you in the kitchen.”

Last fall, Feast launched its first online cooking course, a four-week class designed to teach basic cooking techniques ranging from knife skills to braising. Led by Feast’s in-house chef Jeremy Umansky, the self-paced lessons use detailed text descriptions and photographs along with numerous videos.

It’s in the community discussions, though, that a lot of the real learning goes on, Spinks said. Not only does Umansky engage with students on the boards, but students interact with one another, often solving problems before an instructor get involves, Spinks said. That student interaction also acts a motivator, helping solve one of the key problems of online learning: retention. In self-paced learning programs such as those offered by Coursera, Spinks said, as few as 7 percent of students actually finish the curriculum from beginning to end. Feast’s inaugural class last winter attracted 75 students, and more than half participated up to the very to its conclusion.

The company’s spring semester starts up next week, offering a new kitchen basics class as well as a new course on vegetarian cooking (both $60 for four weeks). Feast has also begun offering a free mini-course on fermentation where you can learn how to make Kimchi, Korean spicy preserved cabbage.

Feast has also managed to attract the attention of Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, which accepted the company into its accelerator’s sixth batch of startups.

Saute pan photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Fedor Kondratenko

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Paying for food online with Bitcoins isn’t new. Pizzaforcoins has famously set up a site that takes Bitcoins in exchange for ordering a pie from your local Domino’s. Some entrepreneurial food purveyors online, such as Bitcoin Coffee, also deal in the digital currency. (For a detailed explanation of how the Bitcoin economy works, check out my colleague David Meyer’s comprehensive post.) But what’s interesting about Foodler is its scope.

Foodler is an online delivery and takeout portal a similar to GrubHub that hosts menus and handles orders for restaurants in 48 states, and it has made Bitcoin another option for payment alongside credit cards, debit cards and cash on delivery. You can’t pay for a pizza or your mu shu pork order with Bitcoin directly to the delivery guy, but Foodler has set up an account portal that generates a unique deposit address and QR code, which customers can use to deposit their Bitcoins. Using the current USD exchange rate, Foodler turns them into FoodlerBucks, which can then be used to pay for orders and even tip through its online portal or mobile app.

It might sound like a marketing gimmick, but Foodler CEO Christian Dumontet said the company is firm believer in innovation, whether it’s technological, economic or, in the case of Bitcoin, both.

“We understand that Bitcoin users are a small, but influential, group of early adopters and Bitcoin orders will likely be a small percentage of all Foodler payments this year, but as early adopters ourselves, we are excited to support the community and help it grow,” Dumontet said in an email. “We were surprised to receive our first Bitcoin payment from a customer in San Francisco just hours after making it available in our system – prior to any kind of public announcement.”

Of course, given the recent nosedive in Bitcoin value, some people may be reluctant to part with their Bitcoins just yet – it would take four times the amount of Bitcoin to buy an $8 burrito today than it did last week. Still, Dumontet isn’t letting the volatility of the crypto-currency phase him. He said would Foodler would hold on to the some of the Bitcoins it does receive, instead of immediately cashing them in for U.S. dollars, and it plans to participate in the Bitcoin economy by seeking out vendors that accept the currency.

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We picked five startups to watch from the morning batch, and talked about some of the changes in this year’s program. The third batch later on Tuesday is off the record. But here are five startups to watch from the second batch on Tuesday afternoon:

Swapbox

As someone who frequently misses package deliveries when UPS or FedEx won’t leave things on my doorstep, I totally understand the pain Swapbox is trying to solve. The company is doing almost exactly what Bufferbox launched at YC’s demo day last August — before the company was bought out by Google. Swapbox is planning to put delivery boxes in retail locations across major cities, starting with San Francisco, charging customers $2 to have packages safely delivered. Having had great experiences using Amazon lockers in San Francisco, I can see why it would make sense to have lockers that any company or delivery service could work with. The key will be having enough lockers in locations that they can be useful, and making sure it’s easy to ship packages to those addresses.

Terascore

As more students start bringing computers, phones, and tablets into the classroom, Terascore is looking to make it easier for teachers to administer digital tests. By doing so, its trying to banish paper bubble sheets and number two pencils forever. The company charges teachers for access to the platform, and then lets them administer, grade, and return assessments to students online. Obviously the challenge with this idea is finding classrooms where all students have computer access — despite gains in technology, not every classroom does. But as the founders noted, eventually this will be the case, and at that point, it makes sense that digital testing will follow.

Meldium

Meldium is a startup that knows that for a lot of small businesses and offices, managing access to shared passwords often involves an Excel spreadsheet or not-terribly-secure means of passing around information. The company provides a cloud-based solution for employees to safely share passwords to about 400 web apps at the moment, basing its pricing on the number of apps and users a client needs access to.

Goldbely

Goldbely is trying to make it easier for consumers to purchase and ship specialty foods across the country, accessing items like Austin-based Salt Lick Barbecue or New York-based Magnolia Bakery cupcakes in a short period of time. The company pointed to the success of companies like Harry & David in building a consumer base around food shipping, and is looking to do the same with a wider selection of products. The company announced Tuesday that it’s entering a partnership with Facebook Gifts, meaning you might have access to better food Gifts on Facebook pretty soon.

Medisas

Medisas provides software services for hospitals, and its first product focuses on cloud-based software that allows doctors and nurses to manage the transition of care of patients when doctors switch from shift to shift. When one doctor leaves a shift and needs to pass along information about the patient, that process often takes place with hand-written paper notes, and Mediasas wants to create software that will bring the transition online, ideally cutting down on the doctor-to-doctor errors that can affect patient care.

This story was updated at 3:10 PT on March 27 after the founders clarified the total number of web apps Meldium supports.

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The launch is timely, considering Punchfork is shutting down its API at the end of the month after it was bought by Pinterest. Several sites and apps tap Punchfork’s recipe content and search capabilities – for instance, Punchfork powered Evernote Food’s Explore Recipes feature – so it will soon be looking for an alternative.

Yummly’s API, though, isn’t just a Punchfork clone, said Brian Witlin, the search portal’s new head of platform and mobile. Punchfork aggregated content from member food blogs and organized its recipes on social principles. Yummly on the other hand delves deep into the ingredients, cooking methods and the science behind each of the recipes it categorizes. It teases nutritional data out of its recipes, and its algorithms can even infer if a particular dish will be spicy, bitter or sweet. Users, for instance, can use Yummly to search specifically for low-fat or gluten-free dish options or find meals guaranteed to blow the socks off even the most jaded spice fiend.

“There are so many ways we can slice and dice the data we have,” Witlin said. “We plan to offer even more options in the next couple of months.” Yummly, however, doesn’t yet have tools to replace the social context Punchfork provides its customers, but Witlin said it’s in the works.

Initially customers most likely will use the Yummly API to provide more generic recipe content and search in their sites and apps. One of Yummly’s early API testers, search engine DuckDuckGo, uses the API to answer specific recipe queries, basically extending Yummly’s search portal onto its own site.

But developers will eventually be able to tap into Yummly’s technology to make their recipe and cooking services smarter. For instance recipe aggregation apps such as Evernote, Paprika and BigOven store recipes scrapped from all over the web, most of them drawn from the same sites Yummly categorizes. Those companies could use Yummly’s API to organize their customers personal recipe boxes into much more useful categories.

Instead of sorting your recipe library by generic soup, salad, meat and poultry labels, you could sort them by calorie level, salt use, level of spiciness or any of hundreds of different categories that aren’t spelled out in the recipes themselves.

Of course, Yummly can only sort the recipes it catalogs so any recipe you enter manually or from a site Yummly doesn’t aggregate won’t benefit from the API. But Witlin said Yummly eventually plans to amp up its recipe parsing technology so it will immediately scan any new recipe it encounters, adding it to its database.  When that happens, there won’t be any recipe Yummly can’t categorize, Witlin said.

Featured image courtesy of Flickr user lilivanili

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“We want to make you happy. We want to give you food shows with attitude,” said Oliver during Monday’s live stream, adding that the idea was to take some of the most popular food topics online — like cooking chicken — and give them the Jamie Oliver treatment. This will include live shows, recipes from around the world (including street food cuisine) and foodie Q&A time with viewers.

One of Food Tube’s contributors is YouTube cook Barry Lewis.

YouTube started to pour money into original content production when it invested a reported $100 million into channels from Hollywood celebrities, traditional news organizations and YouTube stars at the end of 2011. However, not all of those channels were able to attract significant viewership on the site. In November, news broke that YouTube renewed less than 40 percent of its original channel line-up – a number that is strikingly similar to the renewal rate of traditional TV shows.

Unique about YouTube is what’s working on the site: longtime YouTubers like Phil Defranco have had no trouble finding an audience for their new channels; some outside brands on the other hand have struggled. PandoDaily reported last week that ReutersTV and the Wall Street Journal’s YouTube channel are both not receiving any additional funding from the site.

It looks like Oliver learned a lesson from this: the TV personality is aligning himself with YouTube cooks for his channel. YouTubers like Barry Lewis from My Virgin Kitchen will be regularly contributing to the channel, and Oliver also plans to highlight a number of additional YouTube cooks in a special segment called Jamie Presents.

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Punchfork CEO Jeff Miller revealed the acquisition on Punchfork’s website today, though he didn’t disclose a purchase price. Pinterest confirmed Punchfork is its first acquisition in its short history, and given the Pinterest community’s obsession with food pins, it seemed a natural fit for the rapidly growing social network. “People come to Pinterest to find inspiration for their everyday lives and we think Punchfork’s mission aligns with this well,” spokesperson Annie Ha said in a statement.

Punchfork is one of the growing number of recipe aggregation portals on the web, but it’s distinguished itself by building an API which food bloggers and independent recipe sites can tap into to bring their recipes and culinary musings to Punchfork’s growing audience. Punchfork has also developed social and analytics tools that help those bloggers track the popularity of their dishes. While Punchfork has used that API to grow its own membership, it’s also shared it with Evernote, powering the note-taker’s new Explore Recipes function on Evernote Food.

With the takeover, though, Punchfork will shut down its website, mobile apps and API, and the Punchfork team will devote itself to bolstering Pinterest’s already impressive recipe discovery boards.

To give you an idea of how popular food is on Pinterest, community recipe portal Allrecipes.com has reported that in three months after it added a “pin it” button to its pages last summer, 50,000 of its were pinned, generating 139 million impressions. An Experian survey of Pinterest users early last year found that 70 percent of account holders said they pinned recipes and used Pinterest for cooking inspiration, beating out home decorating, fashion and crafting.

Like Pinterest, Punchfork positioned itself as a visually oriented “cooking inspiration” site versus the many more nuts-and-bolts recipe aggregators out there like Paprika, Pepperplate and BigOven. Rather than allowing customers to find their own recipes and store them in their own private recipe collections, Punchfork aggregates recipe content from a broad selection of partners, using its service as a dish-discovery engine.

Other startups have adopted similar strategies. Gojee is even more visually oriented than Punchfork, presenting its dishes in luscious full-screen photos. Evernote competitor Springpad has also taken a page from Pinterest’s book, making the visual organization of recipes a key focus.

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What’s more, Food Genius knows exactly how much more restaurants are charging for adding that sprinkling of basil to turn a standard pie into a pizza Margherita. Food Genius can tell you what hot combinations of ingredients, flavors and culinary buzzwords can boost the appeal – and thus the price – of a dish. In short, Food Genius has built the country’s biggest virtual test kitchen with menu data.

Food Genius has compiled a mammoth database of 100,000 unique menus from independent and chain restaurants around the country, giving it a massive data set to play with, said Justin Massa, Food Genius co-founder and CEO. The startup gets its data from some key menu aggregation partners, the biggest being fellow Chicago food outfit GrubHub. It also takes in readily available menu data from the national and regional restaurant chains, sometimes manually scraping data off of restaurants websites.

Any company can aggregate menus, Massa admits, but Food Genius is only using those raw lists of ingredients and dish descriptions as a starting point. It’s built parsing and categorization algorithms that break down those menu items into 14,000 ingredients, techniques and concepts that make up its internally developed culinary taxonomy. From there, it ferrets out the relationships between the items, like what categories they fall into and how different ingredients and techniques are commonly paired.

By crunching that data, Food Genius had generated more than 1 billion different food concepts, each of which represents a sort of meta-dish. Some of those concepts have been produced millions of times over in restaurants all over the country, like cheeseburgers, but many more are specific to individual restaurants. And others are just concepts inferred from Food Genius’s data.

Teaching a Kraft to cook like a Wolfgang Puck

While it might be tempting to think that Food Genius wants to use its data to automate the creative process of cooking, Massa quickly dispelled that notion. While Food Genius can suggest ingredient combinations based on patterns its database detects, pure math could never replace the chef, Massa said.

Instead, Food Genius is doing the opposite. It’s tracking trends in independent restaurants and relaying that information to big food companies – restaurant chains, food distributors, consultants and most importantly food manufacturers.

“The big food companies take it on faith that innovation starts in independent kitchens,” Massa said. “The problem is the lifecycle of product development at a company like Kraft is two years. Meanwhile, in an independent restaurant, a new dish could be conceived and executed in 30 minutes.”

Food trends are becoming ever more fleeting. Bacon in desserts or gourmet sliders may be hot concepts today, but they could become passé quickly. By using Food Genius’s database, food companies can identify food trends with true mass appeal, and they can latch onto those trends early. The last thing a major food manufacturer wants to do is invest large sums of money and time bringing to market a new line of frozen southwestern chicken entrees, only to discover that the consumers are now into Thai cuisine with pork.

“We want to give them the confidence that they can catch a trend within nine months, rather than within two years,” Massa said.

Taking food analysis to the next level

The company plans to take its service live in January, and already has half a dozen food industry consultants and food product manufacturers signed up. It’s selling its data through a licensing model, with monthly fees starting at $2,000 per user.

Food Genius is one of the growing number of companies to emerge from Excelerate Labs’ accelerator program in Chicago. In September, it raised a $1.2 million funding round led by Hyde Park Venture Partners and Hyde Park Angels with participation by New World Ventures, IDEO, Amicus Capital and I2A Fund.

Massa said right now its customers are using Food Genius data to develop their own food concepts, but as the company scales it hopes to offer more custom analysis. Instead of trying to identify food trends themselves, Food Genius will tell them what trends they should be paying attention to, Massa said.

The startup is also looking for ways to refine its data by tracking what diners are actually ordering, not just what restaurants are offering. Knowing what dishes are in the menu doesn’t tell you which ones are popular. Food Genius would like to delve deeper into sentiment analysis, but Massa will that such data-mining techniques aren’t fully baked, especially when it comes to people’s mercurial tastes in food.

Food Genius could start pairing specific restaurant dishes with reviews in Yelp or dish sightings on apps like Foodspotting, but the information it would gather would be of questionable value.

“Say there’s this one guy who has written 10 Yelp reviews about 10 different brisket dishes he’s had, and he hated every single one of them,” Massa said. “Does he really hate brisket? Or does he really love it? Clearly he’s going to order brisket again at the next place he goes to.”

Saute pan photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Fedor Kondratenko; Dining photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Everett Collection

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“When you’re in the restaurant and you see a dish go by you’re like, ‘Wow, I want that,’ and you don’t  really need 20 data points to know,” said Gojee CEO Michael LaValle. “Most of the web is so text and data-oriented, and we don’t think it’s necessarily the ideal way that people make decisions around emotional things.”

And when you start browsing the beautiful dresses and shoes on Gojee, the addition of the new vertical starts to make more sense (although taking the plunge for Louis Vuitton shoes is a little pricier than buying ingredients even for the nicest steak dish.) Gojee’s new verticals are mostly high-end items from brands like Marc Jacobs, Herve Leger, Chanel, as well as a few other more obscure brands. Most of the items are at least several hundred dollars, and many are in the thousands.

“When a girl walks into Louis Vuitton to look at shoes, she generally knows how much they cost, she doesn’t care if they’re made in Thailand or France, and she knows she’ll like it. So she’ll look at the shoes and be like, ‘This is what I want.’ She doesn’t need to read three pages on the shoe,” LaValle said.

Gojee’s visual nature is often compared to that of Pinterest, LaValle said, but sometimes the experience of hunting through items on Pinterest can feel like looking for “diamonds in the rough.” So by limiting items to high-quality items, Gojee ensures that there’s a better chance users will like what they see, and the site can comfortably highlight individual images without crowding the page for density.

He also noted that no, the beloved food and drink sections aren’t going away — so users who love them have no need to worry. And looking forward, he hopes to expand into other categories like men’s fashion, home decor, and others. The site just launched its mobile apps in September, and the new verticals will fit on those platforms as well.

From a business perspective, it’s not clear that the site is focused on making sales right away — presumably there aren’t that many people who make $73,000 jewelry impulse purchases. But Pinterest has proven that if you can attract plenty of attention and eyeballs on your site, monetization is never far off on the horizon. (LaValle noted that they’ve had a variety of high-end liquor brands asking to advertise on the site’s food and liquor verticals.) So can Gojee make a name for itself amid the multitude of other fashion discovery sites out there? Remains to be seen. But until then, happy browsing. (Just maybe steer clear of the lingerie section while you’re at work.)

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