In an interview with food blog Serious Eats, Brown gave his thoughts on how social media is changing the way the world approaches the rarefied art of recipe writing. Recipes used to immalleable creations, published in cookbooks and magazines or printed on index cards. But with the rise of the internet and social media, recipes are often adjusted, reformulated and repurposed within minutes of being published.

The recipe, Brown said, has become like open-source code. The programmers in this case are cooks and they’re constantly tweaking and improving the code and tossing it back to developer community. If you want an example just look to Food52, a crowdsourced cooking portal where any given recipe is posted by individuals, but then tinkered with by Food52’s community of cooks.

Brown said that trend shouldn’t just be accepted but embraced to create a new kind of digital recipe. “What if each recipe per se had three paths to completion, and you got to choose your path based on what kind of person you are and how you interact with things?” Brown asked. Apparently Brown has a project that will do just that in the works. I for one am very curious to see what he comes up with.

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On Wednesday, though, Gojee launched native apps for the iPad, iPhone and Android devices, which allow its users to take Gojee into the grocery stores where its recommendation engine and pantry tracking tools can prove the most useful.

For those of you unfamiliar, Gojee has aggregated about 10,000 recipes from 300 contributors ranging from crowdsourced food portals like Food52 to individual food bloggers. The site, however, doesn’t allow you to search for specific types of recipes like you would on a traditional food site like Allrecipes.com. Instead you search by key ingredient, and it then begins recommending recipes one by one where that ingredient features highly.

The recommendation service, however, truly becomes useful when paired with its pantry features. Anytime an ingredient appears, you’re given the option of adding it to your list of “I have” items. This causes Gojee to recommend dishes not just based on the key ingredient, but the items stored in your fridge or cabinets. You can even “dislike” certain ingredients.

So say you’re in the mood to cook chicken and have on hand chickpeas, lemons and olives, but you also simply despise the taste of ginger. Gojee crunches all of this variables, and then spits out recommendations for Mediterranean dishes over, for example, Asian dishes. Not only does Gojee know I would probably like those recipes, it also knows they would be the easiest recipes to shop for.

Meal planning on the fly

I’m a regular user of Gojee, and while I love its concept of ingredient-based search – as well as the recipes it serves up – I am often frustrated by its lack of portability. I’m forced to plan my meals before I leave for the store. The smartphone apps, however, now allow me to be far more spontaneous in my meal planning.

For instance, if I’m at the butcher shop and discover short ribs are on sale, I could immediately do a search for short ribs on Gojee. Not only would it recommend recipes, but it would notify me of the exact ingredients I need to buy to make those recipes. Since it knows what I already have it saves me a return trip to the store and from accidentally doubling up on staples already in my pantry.

According to Gojee CEO and co-founder Mike LaValle, Gojee always intended to make mobile a key part of its strategy, but the NYC-based startup wasn’t willing to sacrifice the aesthetics of the service just to throw a quick mobile app into iTunes.

“We want to understand how our users engage with food both physically and emotionally,” LaValle said. “We’ve been developing the mobile app since we launched the site last year. We spent that time obsessing about the design and talking to a lot of customers. We knew how we could take Gojee’s utility mobile, but the bigger challenge was how to create a natural mobile interface that would occupy a new corner of the web.”

Gojee’s meticulous efforts certainly paid off. Recipe apps on smartphones tend to be clunky affairs, shoving as many recipe recommendations, ratings and info into a small screen as possible. Gojee maintains its voluptuous web user interface in the mobile apps, offering up a simple “I crave” search bar and presenting full-screen photos of each recipe, which you can flick through one at time. Each photo has a pull up tab that allows you to preview the ingredients needed and an option to go to the recipe’s web page.

At that stage, the presentation gets a bit awkward as most of Gojee’s partners haven’t optimized their sites for mobile browsers. Gojee offers in-frame tools that allow you to easily zoom in and out on the relevant ingredients, directions and cooking times. An in-app mobile recipe template would be ideal, but that would contradict Gojee’s mission of directing users its partners’ sites. It’s a minor problem, though, in what overall is an incredibly useful and beautiful cooking app.

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Say Mmm is one of dozens of recipe aggregation and organization services sprouting up all on the Web and in app stores, but there’s a key difference between its approach and say a Paprika or a Pepperplate. Rather than require its customers to squirrel recipes behind the walls of a Web portal or app, Say Mmm thinks customers should take advantage of the Internet tools readily available for storing and sharing content, said the startup’s  founder Brian Hutchins.

“We don’t need to reinvent what’s already out there,” Hutchins said. “Rather than be a recipe dumping ground, our end goal is to make tools you can use with recipes that you store anywhere.”

Say Mmm is latching on to both Evernote and Facebooks’ APIs to draw out the recipes that users have saved within them. Say Mmm is then building applications such as meal planners and grocery list tools that organize that food data in ways Evernote and Facebook were never designed to do.

Using the Web as a cooking tool

There is a long list of recipe clipping apps and sevrice out there — in addition to Paprika and Pepperplate there’s KeepRecipes, Ziplist, HungrySeacow’s YummySoup and BigOven. They’re all designed to let you save recipes from the Web and then store and organize that cooking info in ways useful to home cook. For instance, they all have some sort of grocery list generation feature, can create weekly meal plans and often pair ingredients with nutritional data.

While these services are definitely attracting customers among more serious home cooks, the majority of cooks are saving their recipe ideas on the social media and productivity platforms they use every day.

A March survey by Exprian’s PriceGrabber, found that 70 percent of Pinterest account holders cited recipes as their most pinned items, beating out home decorating, crafts and shopping as the biggest source of inspiration among the network’s users. According to Springpad business development VP Jeff Janer, the note-taking service’s 3 million registered users have stored more than 1 million recipes through its clipping engine. A poll conducted of LifeHacker’s readers found that Evernote was by far the most used recipe aggregation tool – albeit among LifeHacker’s more tech-savvy readers.

The problem is that while all of those services are great at grabbing recipes from the Web, they don’t really let you do too much with that information (Springpad is an exception). Facebook and Pinterest don’t distinguish between the recipe you “like” or “pin” and any other object on the Web. Evernote allows you tag and search the recipes you save, but for the most part it’s saving the recipe as raw text in a note, not as a structured recipe file.

Adding structure to unstructured recipe data

Most of Say Mmm’s work so far has been on Evernote. Say Mmm accesses the contents of your Evernote cooking notepads, and then displays those recipes by their titles and their thumbnails in a Pinterest-like interface. From that interface you can sort recipes alphabetically or by tags, you can edit the recipes and photos (with changes reflected in Evernote), you can save a recipe to your Say Mmm recipe book and you can automatically generate shopping lists from the recipe ingredient lists.

Perhaps the most useful feature, however, is the meal planning function, which allows you to generate a schedule of dishes to cook by day or week and then save that plan as a note within Evernote. Say Mmm also allows you to create grocery lists within Evernote itself. By adding the tag “Say Mmm” to any Evernote recipe and then resynching, Say Mmm strips out recipes ingredients and generates a new grocery list organized by category (produce, dairy, etc.). You can even merge grocery lists into a single unified note with other tags.

On Facebook, the features are similar, except Say Mmm is extrapolating a lot of data from what little information Facebook actually stores. The service searches your Facebook news feed for recipes based on the links embedded in your news feeds and timeline. It then pulls metadata from those webpages and organizes those recipes into the same Pinterest-like interface, allowing you to sort dishes and generate meal plans as you would in the Evernote implementation. The Facebook features are still in closed beta, but Hutchins said he plans to launch them publicly this week.

“Evernote is already the perfect platform for organizing things, while Facebook is beautiful for sharing and social elements – there’s just no organization at all,” Hutchins said. In either case, Say Mmm isn’t trying to change what’s most valuable about the Facebook or Evernote. It’s just adding a structural layer that makes the recipe data they store more useful. As for Pinterest, Hutchins said, “the minute they open the API, I’ll be on it.

To be frank, Say Mmm still needs some work before its ready for mass consumer audience. If you’re looking for cutting edge Web design, it’s not here, and there are still some big pieces missing from its feature set. For instance, once you’ve saved a meal plan to Evernote, you can’t generate one unified shopping list from all of the recipes within it. You have to create a separate list from each recipe and then merge them.

Say Mmm, however, is still in the early stages of development, and being a bootstrapped venture, Hutchins is pretty much doing all of the work. A veteran of Grand Central Communications and Google, he left the search giant in 2010 to found Say Mmm and later joined Grand Central founder Craig Walker at food-focused startup Firespotter Labs, where he still works as a consultant. Say Mmm started out of side project that Hutchins is trying to turn into a commercial venture. He’s adding new functions gradually and eventually plans to launch mobile and tablet apps.

At this stage, your kitchen isn’t going to revolve around Say Mmm, but the company is definitely on to something. As I’ve written before, one of the biggest problems with using the Web as a cooking resource is its fragmentation. There’s no common format that would allow you to use any recipe with any service or app. Say Mmm has started building a framework to solve that problem.

Update: An earlier version of this post stated Hutchins started Say Mmm after joining Firespotter Labs. Rather, Hutchins founded Say Hmm and then joined Firespotter. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user gabriel amadeus.

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Screenshot of Foodie (click to enlarge)

Glam Media, the online media company that produces content and serves ads for a primarily female audience, on Thursday is launching a new website Foodie.com, its first foray into the culinary space. Social networking features will be built into the new Foodie website, making it the first site from Glam that deeply incorporates the technology acquired when it bought Ning in late 2011.

A launch with great expectations

In an interview this week, Glam CEO Samir Arora said he expects Foodie to very soon become one of his company’s top most highly trafficked sites. “One year ago, we discovered that our top ad category in revenue during the first quarter of 2011 was food. We didn’t even have a dedicated food category at that time,” Arora said. “That really drove us to sequence Foodie as an important launch.” Glam expects Foodie.com to attract 10 million monthly uniques soon after it debuts — a very impressive draw by most standards.

At launch, Foodie will feature content from prominent chefs, restauranteurs, established food critics and bloggers, and ads from companies including Betty Crocker and Dannon Activia. The real key news about the site, though, is that readers of Foodie will be able to fill out complete social profiles to let them interact with each other and Foodie’s content creators and brands. Glam describes Foodie.com like this: “A full social network for consumers to directly discover, connect and follow top foodies.”

Still an appetite for social media

But will people really want to create yet another social media profile? Glam certainly thinks so. According to CEO Arora, that’s because sites like Facebook are just too general to help us connect with our individual interests like food. The people with whom you’re friends on Facebook may not be the same people with whom you’re interested in sharing recipes. “When I connected my Facebook graph to my Yelp account, I found that I have nothing in common with my friends in terms of our restaurant tastes,” he said.

It’s a fair point — as popular as general social networking sites have become, people still go to specialized content producing sites on the web. Facebook’s Timeline and Open Graph is trying to turn Facebook into a central place where people can customize their ideal web experience content and all, but perhaps people will still want to keep separate online niches where they deal with people who align with them along very specific interests. Foodie.com wants to be the place people go to read and connect with like-minded people about all things culinary.

Food may be just the beginning

Arora said this push toward social was always the direction in which Glam planned to go, and that the Ning acquisition which closed in December accelerated the process. “Otherwise, if we had to build it ourselves, we’d probably take five years.” If Foodie is the success it’s expected by the company to be, other verticals in Glam’s portfolio could go the social route as well.

It’s an ambitious move to make, but Glam already has such a massive audience — 220 million unique visitors a month, 90 million of them in the United States — that if anyone besides Facebook is going to turn itself into a totally social content web destination, it’s them.

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While the Web and other digital technologies have greatly amplified our exposure to new foods and cuisines, how we store, organize, and sort that wealth of culinary data remains practically unchanged. Recipes are still largely isolated on the Web, either residing on Websites, trapped in e-cookbooks or buried within a plethora of cooking apps. They’re no different than the cookbooks sitting on my shelves or the hand-scrawled recipe cards in a recipe box – each self-contained and isolated from the recipes or recipe collections around them.

What’s needed is a standard recipe media format that can be shared between applications and the Web. Like the MP3 or ACC format used in music, a recipe needs to become a standardized digital good, one that can be bought, sold, shared, edited and annotated. A recipe file could be rights-protected or it could be DRM-free, but ultimately it would have to be readable by any recipe application, browser or e-book reader.

Testing the limits of today’s recipe tools

Last month, I experimented with creating a digital recipe library using a few of the most popular recipe aggregation apps and Web portals, but I found that piecing together all of the different recipes available online into a coherent collection was a practical impossibility. KeepRecipes, Paprika, MacGourmet, and numerous other services all scrape recipes from Webpages and turn them into neatly cataloged recipe files. While all of them can easily grab recipes from the most commonly sourced cooking sites such as the Food Network or Epicurious, they all fail to identify and capture recipes outside of those big food portals. Most cooking blogs – where a lot of truly innovative cooking resides – might as well not exist to those apps.

KeepRecipes co-founder Phil Michaelson said this is a universal problem for any recipe aggregation tool because there’s no standard format for recipe markup on the Web. KeepRecipes can’t grab a recipe if it can’t identify it as one or distinguish between the ingredients, measurements and directions sections on the page.

The big food sites are more easily deciphered because they have all adopted the recipe markup formats promoted by Google and Facebook. Called hRecipe, the microformat provides a common language for search engines and other Websites to index and interpret recipe data. Recipe cataloging tools like KeepRecipes can just as easily use those markup tags to build recipe files, Michaelson said.

But there is some resistance to the widespread adoption of those formats. Michaelson said in an e-mail:

What we need is for more newspaper Websites, recipe bloggers, and recipe search engines to embrace these markup languages.  We also need less toolbars and iframes around recipe content that disrupt sharing and parsing of Webpages. We see resistance to adding technology (that is, a recipe markup language) that doesn’t have a clearly predictable [return on investment].  Everyone from Tumblr.com and WordPress.com (which power many recipe blogs) to TheKitchn.com would empower recipe authors to publish using a recipe markup format if they could estimate the ROI.

According to Michaelson, KeepRecipes tries hard to provide that financial incentive to bloggers and big food sites alike. It will only scrape a full recipe after a member visits the Website on which it’s posted. Because KeepRecipes is also a cooking community portal, allowing members to share dishes, particular recipes have the potential of going viral, driving curious cooks back to the dishes’ sources.

But ultimately the concept of a recipe aggregator stands in the face of whatever business model a recipe publisher is using. Whether you’re the Food Network, a cookbook author, or a small-time blogger, you want to get to paid, whether it’s through advertising revenues generated by page views, selling e-cookbooks and individual recipes, or just simple recognition. If you make it easier to traffic in recipes digitally, those business models are threatened.

There’s money to be made in digital food

That’s the beauty of recipe file format. Like any other digital media it can be rights protected. Sure, there will be lots of cases of infringement, but every other form of media faces the same problem, and it’s always been easier to steal a copyrighted recipe than it is to pirate a song or movie. Today you can cut and paste a recipe from a website into an email or document or grab it with a digital notepad service like Evernote.

Adjusting business models to accommodate new digital recipe media would be easy for some. If you buy a cookbook, the publisher should allow you to download the complete library of recipes into any recipe management app, just like many music distributors have begun to encourage the revival of vinyl by packaging an album’s digital tracks with the analog record. E-cookbook publishers should do the same.

For Web-based recipe collections, the model may be a bit more difficult. An online subscription-recipe service like Cook’s Illustrated could extend its business model to include recipe downloads, allowing you to access and store its entire library as long as you are a paying member, just as Rhapsody does for music media. The New York Times and Food & Wine could make free downloads conditional on print or digital subscriptions to their publications.

Sites that depend on advertising might have difficulty making those revenue schemes work, but there’s plenty they can do to bring customers back to their sites, whether through video tutorials or recommendation engines. A food site also could charge a nominal fee to download a recipe, say 25 cents, rather than read it through the browser. Social networking recipe sites like AllRecipes.com could use paid downloads of recipe files as a way to distribute revenues among its members, creating an everyman’s recipe store.

Long live the cookbook!

At GigaOM’s Roadmap conference in November, Inkling founder and CEO Matt MacInnis declared that digital cookbook is a far more useful tool than the traditional printed-and-bound cookbook, and he had a pretty good example to back up his claim. Inkling publishes the digital version of the The Professional Chef, the Culinary Institute of America’s classic teaching cookbook. The shelf version is an imposing tome, but Inkling has done plenty to make Pro Chef accessible to a wider audience by stuffing it into the iPad and optimizing the cookbook for a digital medium.

Inkling laces its electronic pages with more than 100 video tutorials and other multimedia. It makes the cookbook endlessly and easily searchable in ways a standard cookbook index is not. You can annotate and bookmark favorite recipes, rather than scrawl illegibly on or dog-ear a bound page.

But a digital cookbook is still a book – you have endless amounts of flexibility within the application or e-book itself, but it remains isolated in the digital ether. No one cooks from a single cookbook, and no cookbook can claim it holds every recipe a home chef would ever need. Though Inkling has created an extremely versatile and useful tool, I would argue that by sticking with the e-book format Inkling saddled it with needless limitations.

A truly useful cookbook can’t be treated like a novel or a textbook. A cookbook is a collection of individual recipes as much as it is a self-contained work, just an album is made up of individual songs. Publishers need to distribute the parts as well as the whole.

I’m not advocating the demise of the cookbook here — far from it. Mastering the Art of French Cooking is an exhaustive compendium of classic recipes, but it’s also an expression of the philosophical and culinary conviction of its principle author, Julia Child. Larousse Gastronomique is replete with recipes, but it’s more an encyclopedia of cuisine and technique than a true cookbook. If digitizing our cookbooks means atomizing the art and science of cuisine into hundreds of thousands of non-contextualized recipes, then we will have lost a huge resource.

That said, the practical side of cooking is just as – if not more — important than its art. Everyone must eat and most of us have little time to cook. The Internet and other digital technologies have given us access to countless new dishes and methods for cooking. Now those technologies  just need to provide us with a way to organize that vast quantity of information so we can actually get down to the business of cooking.

Cookbook/iPod image courtesy of Flickr user LizMarie_AK

Good Housekeeping Cookbook image courtesy of Flickr user Lori L. Stalteri

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For more read the follow-up post: A better recipe for digital cuisine

Remember those roasted Brussels sprouts you made last year for the holidays? The whole family loved them — even Uncle Enzo, who normally turns green whenever forced to eat something of that color. Your family now thinks you’re a kitchen wizard and wants you to repeat your culinary feat this weekend, but you can’t seem to find the recipe. You remember discovering it online last year after having one egg nog too many, but you can’t remember where. The copy you printed out has long since made its way into a recycling bin, and when you type “Roasted Brussels Sprouts” into Google you get thousands of listings. If you can find that recipe again, you must remember to save it. But how?

When you find that perfect ingredient combination for pumpkin pie filling or the ideal technique for roasting Cornish game hens, the web doesn’t give you many options for holding onto it. You can bookmark recipes that have a dedicated URL; you can cut and paste recipes into an email or document; or you can hit the ‘print’ button, but these are all pretty clunky ways of storing ideas you want for quick reference. Many of the big recipe sites  now have digital recipe boxes behind their login screens, but those are of limited use as well. Maintaining dozens of different accounts with food sites is not only a pain, but by distributing my recipes all over the Internet, I can’t browse, sort or search them as whole.

This year, I decided to build a digital recipe library using what tools were available on the web and through various app stores. It turns out there are plenty of recipe aggregation tools out there, but I wound up focusing on three: Paprika’s Mac and iPad apps, MacGourmet’s Mac App, and KeepRecipes’ web portal. I discovered they’re all great services for saving and cataloging specific types of recipes, but they all share a single huge limitation.

First, the good

KeepRecipes is both a recipe library and a community cooking portal. You can enter your own creations or cut and paste recipes manually into its fields, but the really handy tool is a button you install in the bookmarks bar of your browser. If you find a recipe you want to save for a later date, you hit the button and up pops a recipe window with the ingredients, directions, notes and pictures pre-entered – theoretically, at least – into the appropriate fields. You tap the save button and the recipe is stored in your digital online library forever more.

Paprika's recipe management app for Mac

Paprika and MacGourmet perform similar types of website scraping, but they do so within embedded browsers. You surf to a recipe page through the apps, and when you press the save button, both generate digital recipe cards with the relevant fields for ingredients, their individual measurements, directions, notes, even dietary information and photos. Both apps go beyond just storing recipes, though. With both, you can create shopping lists with one click on a recipe and even generate weekly meal planners. Paprika and MacGourmet both have iPad and iPhone apps as well, allowing you to sync shopping lists and recipes between devices. That’s quite handy if you don’t know what want you cook before you go to the store or if you happen upon some tremendous deal on lamb chops and change your meal plans on the fly.

These are all great apps, though each performs some functions better than others. If I wanted to write my own digital cookbook using my own recipes (which right now are hand-scrawled into a dog-eared notebook), I’d go with MacGourmet. It allows you to enter a tremendous level of detail for each recipe, all of it in relevant searchable fields. The interface is a bit clunky, though, compared to Paprika’s more streamlined look. Paprika also seemed to have the better scraping algorithms, putting the right data into the right boxes, and it was able to grab a lot recipes MacGourmet couldn’t. It also generated far more useful shopping lists, with simple lists of ingredients and quantities you can check off your iPad with a finger flick.

As for KeepRecipes, I loved the concept more than I loved the actual implementation. Its web-based service is not only free; it’s very democratic. I could access my recipes from any browser, even the microbrowser on my Android phone. MacGourmet and Paprika require you to download – and pay for – different versions of their apps on your different devices, and neither supports Android. (I suppose we Android users are expected to survive on take-out Chinese and frozen pizzas.)

KeepRecipes also has built up an extensive community so you can share recipes with friends, follow what other people are cooking and promote favorite dishes. The problem is that KeepRecipe’s scraping function is pretty basic. It’s really entering data into a few text fields rather than cataloging the components of a recipe, and it often fails to scrape the right or any information at all from a recipe page. KeepRecipes’ scraping methodology was definitely the most wonky, but it wasn’t alone.  It’s a problem facing any app trying to decipher a recipe from the seemingly random HTML code of a website.

Now the bad

The scraping algorithms of all three apps are optimized to read the recipe formats of most popular cooking websites such as the Food Network or Epicurious. Once you go outside the list, the apps can’t recognize the recipe staring at you from your screen.

Of course, those big cooking sites hold huge repositories of recipes for any dish imaginable. If you love Alton Brown (which I do) and Emeril Lagasse (which I don’t), then you can create a substantial recipe library by mining the Food Network site alone. But the best food ideas aren’t necessarily on those big sites. Some of the most innovative – and tasty – stuff is going on at the innumerable culinary blogs popping up all over the web. Every time I tried to grab a dish off of the recipe blog aggregator Gojee, I saw the same message telling me MacGourmet or Paprika couldn’t detect the recipe or the same KeepRecipes window with a bunch of blank fields.

Then there’s the issue of compatibility. Once I save a recipe with Paprika or MacGourmet, they’re trapped inside those applications, stored in a proprietary format. KeepRecipes has great community sharing features, but my recipes are still locked within that community. Since I might find each app useful for different things, at the end of the day, I wind up three separate digital recipe collections.

And what about the quarter-metric-ton of dead trees on my bookshelves? While I’m increasingly going to the web for my recipe ideas, Julia Child’s (et al) Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking and Larousse Gastronomique are my culinary bibles. Even if I can build a digital catalog of my favorite dishes from the web, how do I bring these culinary staples (which make up the lion’s share of my cooking) into that new digital library?

If I were to pick one app, I’d probably go with Paprika, since it was the easiest to use and had the best success rate in transforming online recipes into usable digital recipe cards. But I’m under no illusions that I can use Paprika as the foundation of a comprehensive digital recipe library. When it comes to food, the web has made finding a wealth of new ideas and dishes much easier, but when it comes to storing and organizing those concepts, the web has effectively changed nothing from the days of the printed cookbook. My recipes are still bound in tomes. Some of those tomes are now digital, but they’re just as isolated from one another as the cookbooks on my shelves.

Note: While this post identifies the problem of cataloging recipes in the digital age, my follow-up post explores a possible solution. For more read A better recipe for digital cuisine: Why digital cookbooks need to emulate digital music

Bookshelf image courtesy of Flickr user Paper Cat
Cookbook image courtesy of Flickr user Lori L. Stalteri

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Allrecipes.com said it had its biggest traffic day ever on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. The website saw more than 6.8 million visits from people who viewed more than 32.5 million pages of content. According to Allrecipes, that represents a 32 percent increase from the day before Thanksgiving 2010. For larger reference, typically the site sees some 24 million unique visitors over the course of one month.

And more people are looking for food-based content while they’re away from the desktop. Visits to Allrecipes.com from a mobile device during the three weeks leading up to Thanksgiving were up 218 percent year-over-year, the company says.

Of course, this news could come in handy given Allrecipes’ current strategic situation. Last month, Allrecipes’ parent company Readers Digest announced plans to put the cooking site up for sale.

But regardless of the fact that Allrecipes is in play, there is definitely a larger trend at work here. For example, a new tablet-based cookbook produced by iPad textbook startup Inkling is selling like hotcakes: Earlier this month it became the third highest grossing iPad app worldwide. Meanwhile, new startups such as Foodily are solely aimed at making it super easy to find and share recipes with online contacts. With so many people looking to the web for recipes and cooking tips, there are certainly more food-focused technologies on the horizon.

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