All Gojee needs to know is what staples or ingredients you have on hand, what meal or category of food you’d like to cook, and anything you absolutely won’t or can’t eat. Once this information is plugged in, Gojee produces not just recipes, but beautiful photos of food for users to swipe through and get inspired for an upcoming meal.

After being recommended to me by one of my colleagues, Gojee has been my go-to cooking app for several months. These days, I end up preparing at least two meals per week with this app and have rarely made the same thing twice, thanks to the sheer variety of food blogs it pulls recipes from. I think it could be a good fit for anyone, no matter their skill in the kitchen.

Here’s a quick tour of Gojee’s food recommendation app.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Forecast: Tablet App Sales To Hit $8B by 2015
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics

“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.)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Open-sourcing the food industry: new technology for a new food system
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics

A group of folks concerned about sustainable foods have built the seeds of an open food database hosted on Heroku, with the code pertaining to it located at Github. The group, which gave an awesome panel at South by Southwest in Austin, consisted of a restaurateur chef, someone from an urban gardening movement, someone from Code for America and someone who rates sustainable restaurants.

So far, they have created a database of 1,000 foods and hope to have 7,000 that folks can access via an API. “It’s absurd that everyone has to build a whole new list of foods to build an app,” said Anthony Nicalo, CEO of Foodtree, and a chef.

I was excited about the effort since I wrote about the idea last April, and again in July, inspired by recipe site Gojee. After playing with that and other apps such as Food on the Table, I realized I needed a single way to identify food from one app to another. This is a challenging task for a variety of reasons, with one being that the makers of many of the processed foods that Americans eat, or even prepared foods served in restaurants, are composed of a multitude of ingredients (some are food and some are not).

However, the Open Food folks have sidestepped the issue of processed foods by only including whole foods in their database. But to make such a database useful for a wide variety of people and purposes, I think things like Coke or Twinkies will have to be included. For example, the power of Open Food data extends beyond food apps to calorie-counting apps or even budgeting apps.

Even those that might be threatened by such a service recognize the utility of an open food database. Alex Rosenfeld, the CEO and founder of Tasted Menu, an app that shows restaurant diners what the best foods are on a given menu, thinks the idea is a good one. He is an example of an entrepreneur who has built his food company first by hiring a bunch of Culinary Institute of America chefs to build a taxonomy for 6,000 foods and their associated tags.

He texted me after the panel to say that his primary concern was that the effort be cautious about how it tries to attribute things to restaurants. For example, while he might gain value from starting from such a database, his real value is the taxonomy his team has created around dishes. So, if one checks out catfish po’ boys on Tasted Menu, his app could use the Open Food data for the catfish or the breading, but his app will also note that the food is Cajun or Creole, fried, a sandwich and other things that will help real users figure out where they want to go and what they want to eat.

But establishing a basic nomenclature for the web is a great way to turn the heat up on food apps.

Image courtesy of Flickr user gabriel amadeus.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The case for low-power servers in the data center
• Data center, meet the smart grid
• Locating data centers in an energy-constrained world

The search engine is simple: You sign up with your email, and tell it what you want, what you have on hand, and anything you dislike — then it shows you beautiful photos of meals that you can make with your ingredients. It’s a recommendation engine, but for a select portion of its customers it’s also a real-time data repository that can use their trips to the grocery store as a means of telling them what to cook. Gojee has a relationship with D’Agostino, a 15-chain store in New York that has connected its loyalty card to the service. So within a minute or two of buying their groceries, Gojee users who shop at D’Agostino (and give Gojee their loyalty card number) can see their “I have” section populate with their freshly bought groceries.

Finding the recipe for success

I’ve been really interested in how we can make food fit for the web, so we can track what we eat and help connect our food with our digital to-do lists, social networks and meal-planning services. Mike LaValle, CEO and co-founder of Gojee is just as interested. The current version of Gojee is actually the third iteration of the site, as LaValle and his cofounder struggled to bring food data to the mass consumer audience. LaValle, who used to work at Morgan Stanley, built his first attempt at Gojee to offer what LaValle calls “a Mint.com-like experience around food.”

The first version failed, however, in part because consumers found it too overwhelming — so LaValle tried again with a what he explained was more qualitative analysis rather than quantitative analysis. He compared it to both a Twitter for food and something like a Farecaster for groceries, that would estimate the price for things that one buys. But that site didn’t even make it past the initial testing. When someone said they really like the recipe-recommendation feature, LaValle — desperate to find something that worked — seized upon it and built Gojee. He apparently has hit enough of a winner to draw an enthusiastic group of initial users, and now he’s seeking an undisclosed amount in seed funding to help expand the site.

While LaValle seems to have discovered what CEO Andy Smith from the DailyBurn discovered about consumers and health and food data when he released the MealSnap app — namely that simple is better for mass adoption — it’s the depths of the data he can access that make the service intriguing. LaValle may not be taking advantage of it, but food is a huge opportunity for startups and web companies because everyone eats. And while today most people may not want calorie information on a site, if they could link it to their pedometer or to a computer-created grocery list comprised of recipes they want to serve in the coming week, there could be a big opportunity.

The coming food revolution

LaValle thinks we’re about 24 months away from mass adoption of such an opportunity, and that Gojee is merely a small wedge trying to pry that opportunity open by enticing grocers to share their data and by getting consumers comfortable with the idea. “I think right now we want to be the No. 1 go-to spot for inspiration and that’s our focus for short to medium term. Then we’ll be broadening the service and reaching out to a lot of chains that have been watching us and starting that avalanche of turning that information back to users,” La Valle said.

LaValle said that translating food consumption into applications and actionable data for consumers is a huge source of innovation for startups and the packaged goods and grocery industries much like open financial data standards and searchable travel data did a few years back. “This could spawn a decade in food data that mirrors what happened in financial data and the travel industry as well,” LaValle said. I for one can’t wait.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The importance of putting the U and I in visualization
• How search can unlock the power of big data
• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises