| Related Articles: Restaurants, All |
Online Recipes: Yummly.comDavid Feller’s new website allows users to pick their own likes and dislikesby Stett Holbrook on Aug 05, 2010DAVID FELLER dislikes mustard. A lot. But he loves technology and food. So it’s not surprising that the former eBay and StumbleUpon executive helped create a website that would feed his interest in cooking and help him avoid the dreaded yellow condiment. Yummly.com, which debuted last week, allows users to search a database of some 500,000 recipes using a host of filters for things like ingredients, allergies, price and preparation time. If someone doesn’t like mustard or, say, cilantro, they simply enter that term and will never see a recipe with those ingredients again. The recipes come from mainstream sites like Epicurious, Chow and Martha Stewart. The site also crunches nutritional data for each recipe and allows you to edit recipes and upload your own. What really sets the Redwood City–based company apart from other web-based recipe sites is that, like Pandora.com or Netflix, Yummly gets to know users over time and makes suggestions based on their personal tastes in food. “Amazon has done it for shopping,” Feller says. “Pandora has done it for music, and Netflix has done it for movies, but no one has done it with food. Yummly has an actual understanding of what’s going on with food.” The site is linked with Facebook so users can log in and share recipes from there; it also has a Twitter-like feature called “TasteBuds” that allows users to follow what other folks are cooking. iPhone and iPad applications are coming, too. What I like about Yummly is how easy it is to customize recipes. My son and I are omnivores, but my daughter doesn’t eat dairy, and my wife is flirting with veganism. I simply check the appropriate boxes, and Yummly gives me a huge number of recipes based on all those preferences. Each recipe that pops up gives me a quick view of the ingredients before I view the actual recipe so I know whether to proceed based on dietary restrictions or preferences. I’m always trying to lower my grocery bill, so I like that each recipe includes a price per serving, too. While I haven’t played around with Yummly long enough to see the results, I can also enter terms like “local,” “sustainable” and “organic” into my personal preference profile. Yummly is currently free and ad-free. But Feller says part of his business model will be hypertargeted marketing based on the vast data collected from user preferences. For example, if someone continually searches for barbecue recipes, down the road they can expect to see barbecue sauce ads pop up. That’s a fair trade for a site that aims to cater to an individual’s tastes, no matter how picky. DIY in the Kitchen Yummly.com by Stett Holbrook on Aug 05, 2010 |
 |
|
|
