The folks over at iFood.tv are no longer just proffering up cooking videos and recipes. They have decided to tackle the huge and crowded market for online nutritional data. IFood.tv founders Alok Ranjan and Vikrant Mathur have launched a nutritional search engine and database called NutritionRank with the rather ambitious goal of making it the web’s top repository of dietary health information.

The web is brimming over with nutritional resources and databases that let you parse any nutritional measurement. Dieting and fitness apps are crowding one another in mobile app stores. Food search engine Yummly has already built up a big online following by allowing home cooks to search out recipes by cholesterol, fat and carb content. Even Google has gotten into the game with a calorie-counting recipe search feature.

But according to Ranjan, all of those numerous and varied services are all regurgitating the same U.S. Department of Agriculture data. NutritionRank will distinguish itself by adding a layer of valuable context on top of that data. As its name implies, the search engine is going to rank all the foods we eat.

NutritionRank has worked with three nutritional scientists to create an algorithm that assigns a value from 0 (being the worst) to 100 for any individual food ingredient, recipe, packaged food item or restaurant dish. As long as there is raw nutritional or ingredient info available about an item, the algorithm can tackle it, crunching the ingredient list of an online recipe or the government-mandated nutrition info on the back of a box of pasta.

“We’ve created a good comparator of different foods,” said Atul Kumar, a gastroenterologist and Stony Brook University Hospital professor who helped NutritionRank develop its methodology.

NutrionRank.com allows you to compare foods side by side. For instance, you can compare a Burger King cheeseburger to McDonald’s Big Mac or either to an apple. Or you can look up the healthiness of your favorite foods. That blue box of mac and cheese we loved so much as kids and many of us still love now? The NutritionRank of its cheese topping is 0, though to be fair to Kraft some of its specialty mac and cheese brands have much better rankings. A bundle of fresh basil has a rank of 100.

Right now NutritionRank’s database is focused on packaged foods and big chain restaurant dishes for which dietary information is readily available. But the company plans to expand the breadth of food items it covers as it expands its business model. Ranjan said while the search engine is a valuable resource, the true value of its rankings will be realized once they proliferate beyond the NutritionRank.com portal.

It wants Google and Yummly to search by its ranking system. It wants recipe sites and food brands to invite NutritionRank to parse their dishes and display their ranks on their web pages. It wants popular food destinations on the web like the Food Network to embed its nutrition search bar in their sites. Ranjan and Mathur are getting the ball rolling by ranking many of the recipes within their own culinary site, iFood.tv.

NutritionRank is making its API available to anyone for free. So how will it make money? Ranjan said he plans to implement a kind of AdWords for healthy eating. Just as Google displays sponsored search results at the top of every query page, NutritionRank will deliver paid results at the top of all search pages.

That may seem counterproductive to the company’s core mission of recommending the healthiest food. But Ranjan doesn’t see a conflict. He pointed out that even sponsored results will always include rankings, so any advertiser trying to promote unhealthy food would look a bit foolish. On the other hand a company like Kraft might use sponsored results of a “mac and cheese” search to promote its healthier alternatives to the famous blue box.

Featured image courtesy of Flickr user lilivanili

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Five years after launch, iFood.tv has built up a sizable library of 25,000 cooking and recipe videos supplied by partners and the site’s own users, who now account for 4 million unique viewers a month. iFood.tv has tried to set itself apart from the big food and cooking brands that rule cable TV by approaching food content as educational rather entertainment, said company co-founder Vikrant Mathur. iFood.tv wants people to come to its site to learn how to poach an egg or whisk cream into soft peaks, rather than watch pre-programmed cooking shows.

But now the cooking site appears ready to step onto the Food Network’s and the Cooking Channel’s turf, moving from the kitchen and office into the living room where entertainment reigns. iFood.tv is making its content more coach-potato friendly by curating its video library and creating its own ‘channels’ of content – for instance channels devoted to wine or Mexican food. But Mathur said the connected TV apps are still aimed at iFood.tv’s core viewers. While some viewers may click on the wine channel, sit back and take a tour of a winery, many more will be looking for ideas about how to pair wines with their coming meals.

“The connected TV space is fundamentally changing the way people are consuming media,” Mathur said. “Long-tail content is being accentuated.”

But with iFood.tv’s second prong of attack, mobile, it hopes to zero in on the practical side of cooking in the kitchen. Its recently updated iPhone and new Android apps don’t just allow users to access video, but to store favorite recipes in a video recipe box and keep a picture diary of dishes cooked. Mathur said iFood.tv is very conscious of the growing trend of people using their phones and tablets as electronic recipe books and digital kitchen assistants. Nearly 10 percent of iFood.tv’s video and recipe views come from iOS and Android devices, either from the iPhone app or from mobile browsers. It plans to tap further into that trend with an iPad app in coming months.

To that end, iFood.tv is expanding the content and tools on the site and apps beyond video. It has 150,000 text recipes on site to complement its video library, and it’s begun embedding ingredients and instructions directly into each. The idea is that users will watch the videos while in the kitchen, pausing the stream to view ingredient lists and measurements as they cook. Eventually iFood.tv plans to take the channels it has built for connected TV and recreate them as apps for tablets and smartphones.

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