Recent News 2009

ON THE HOT SEAT

By Megan Woolhouse, Globe Staff

Food Site Finds Recipe for Mixing in Sponsors

September 6, 2009

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — The recession has brought out the home cook in many of us, and that has led more people onto the Internet in search of recipes. Allrecpes.com has turned that need into a big business, integrating recipes posted by individuals with recipes posted by corporations promoting products, like Kraft cheese or Campbell’s soup. It’s a viral marketing approach that appears to be a recipe for financial success. The site has seen a nearly 50 percent increase in visits in the last year. According to Nielsen NetRatings, Allrecipes.com also recently topped the Food Network’s recipe website, FoodNetwork.com which has dominated the number one spot for several years. Wellesley native Lisa Sharples,Allrecipes’ president, recently discussed the company’s growth and its viral advertising efforts with Globe reporter Megan Woolhouse.

Are there any professional chefs on Allrecipes’ payroll?
No. Allrecipes was started by a guy [Tim Hunt] here in Seattle 13 years ago. He was getting his PhD in anthropology and he believed that the sharing of recipes was a way to pass down culture and family history. He appreciated it almost like it was an anthropological experiment and built it himself because of his desire to create this environment where people could pass on culture and family history. It became such a big thing, he quit the [PhD] program and ended up doing it full time.

Reader’s Digest bought the website in 2006. How much did they pay him for it?
Sixty–six million dollars. Tim Hunt retired. Right now he’s in Easter Island pursuing anthropology projects.

How big is Allrecipes’ staff?
About 110 employees. About 20 percent work in development and technology, about 30 percent work in advertising sales and support, and the remaining staff does editorial and features development. We work with consumers and had a pretty sizeable staff for our international rollout last year in the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, France, China, and Japan. It wasn’t just taking United States recipes and translating them. It was an effort to make sure we launched in the United Kingdom with recipes born in the United Kingdom.

Before you expanded the site to other countries, how did you get people to share their recipes?
Because we’re part of Reader’s Digest. Reader’s Digest is in 55 countries and has recipe books they’ve published over the years in all those countries. We leveraged Reader’s Digest content to start the websites. You can’t start a site with zero recipes.

Corporations might want to share recipes promoting their products, but aren’t a lot of people leery to share their best recipes?
Obviously there are people that are like that. We have 40,000 published recipes on our US site and pretty much every one was from a contributor or a community member.

So why do people post them on your site?
A lot of people cook for others because they show their love through food. It’s a recognition thing. On Allrecipes.com, you become a celebrity if your recipe is really popular.

How does the site make money?
We are an ad supported business. We make money by partnering with companies like Campbell’s and Kraft and promoting their product. They will sponsor or they will integrate recipes [as advertising throughout the site].

Did loyal users of the site object to the integration of recipes sponsored by corporations and the introduction of brand–name products in some recipes?
We asked our users if they would be upset if some of the recipes came from branded companies. They said, ‘No, we use the recipes on a Campbell’s can all the time.’ They also see the ratings by other users. If 300 people made it and feel good using the recipe, they will say so.

Do you ever remove negative posts about a recipe or a product?
We do talk to our advertisers. If someone puts up a recipe for chicken with mushrooms and someone writes, ‘I tried this and it had too much sodium,’ we will post that. We tell advertisers you might get some negative feedback, this is a community and users are generating all this content. We have a staff of editorial folks here that are on the back end, reviewing it to make sure it’s appropriate and relevant. If someone writes a mean–spirited review saying, ‘This was so gross my dog wouldn’t eat it,’ we don’t post that. It’s not constructive.

How often does that happen?
Once in a while.

What were Allrecipes’ revenues last year?
We don’t release revenue numbers. We have grown our ad revenues 30 percent year–over–year for the last three years. The economy has been difficult on a lot of businesses, but people cook more at home when they’re concerned about their income. We’ve seen amazing growth with visits and unique users, 40 percent growth year–over–year in new members.

You’re from Wellesley originally. How did you come to the company?
I had been senior vice president of marketing for Classmates.com. This opportunity came up a little over two years ago. I felt there was a big opportunity to take this to the next level.

How do you measure the site’s success?
This year, we eclipsed the Food Network, the number one food site. That’s a big company with a lot of marketing muscle, a TV channel, and celebrities. We don’t spend any money on marketing. There’s not many websites you can look at that spend no money on marketing. I think that speaks to the viral nature of it. I think everyone that uses Allrecipes.com thinks it’s their website. They don’t think of a company behind it. That’s so cool.

Allrecipes.com: Get Instant Meal Ideas From The Dinner Spinner

By David James

August 19, 2009

“What’s for dinner?” is often a question without an answer. If you’re like almost everyone else in the modern world you’ll often find very little time for home-cooked meals. Luckily, there are now ways to find fast, easy and affordable recipes from others just like yourself. The Allrecipes.com app offers up an innovative “Dinner Spinner” program that lets the user find all kinds of recipes that are fast and easy to prepare.

Usually the end of the day will see someone preparing a meal that is fast but not always what they would like to be making. This app allows the user to seek out easy recipes by type – for instance there are thousands of appetizers, main dishes, drinks, side dishes and much more. They can also look by ingredient – for example, if they find that fish is on sale at their local market they can seek out the best recipe for their family and budget.

Users can also find recipes by the amount of time they will take to prepare, and this is probably one of the best features of the app since most people don’t have much time to spend cooking dinner. Don’t know what to make? Just shake your device and the “spinner” makes a choice for you!

Currently iPod Touch and iPhone users can download such classics as the Betty Crocker Cookbook or Whole Foods Market Recipes, but these don’t have the easy to use ‘Dinner Spinner’ feature that makes Allrecipes.com the perfect meal companion.

This remarkably handy app is entirely free to download.

If you want to begin making quick and easy meals from scratch, you will want to take advantage of this free app today!

Canning Not Just for Grandma Anymore

August 13, 2009

Seattle — Home canning, fueled by movements to eat more fruits and vegetables, save money and eat locally is gaining favor among younger people, a Seattle Web site says.

A survey of its community by Allrecipes.com, a food Web site that receives 300 million hits annually, indicates the demographic of canners is shifting from baby boomers to Generations X and Y –– and nearly half of canners are age 40 or younger.

Moreover, almost half of canners live in suburban areas, signaling that canning is no longer reserved to rural communities –– or grandma, the Web site says.

As the recession progresses and food prices continue to rise, 61 percent of canners say their greatest motivation is saving money.

Canning has traditionally been a family tradition passed down by generations, but younger people are looking for canning advice on the Internet. Allrecipes.com says its canning page views increased by 109 percent since last year.

Allrecipes.com is supporting the national “Canvolution” by partnering with Canning Across America, a grassroots canning movement started by food writers, bloggers, cooks, gardeners and food lovers to revitalize the popularity of canning as a way to make it easier to “strive for five,” serving of fruits and vegetables.

No survey details were provided.

Bad Times, Good Deals

By Gabriella Boston

August 12, 2009

Cooking more at home these days? If so, you might want to take a look at www.allrecipes.com for free inspiration and recipes. The site –– which receives more than 270 million visits annually –– allows home cooks to share and download recipes.

The site, part of the Reader’s Digest Association Inc., currently features a variety of summer dining ideas, including recipes for Texas pork ribs, spicy barbecued chicken and a salsa pasta salad complete with fresh cilantro and green chiles.

There is also a section devoted to summer slushies and another to planning summer picnics of various types, including company, family and romantic.

Bon appetit!

Top 15 Social Media Resources for Foodies

By Josh Catone

Cooking Food

July 30, 2009

Allrecipes is the mother of all recipe sites and the web’s most visited food site. With over 40,000 recipes, most submitted by users, with ratings and discussions, Allrecipes is a must stop for anyone searching for a recipe. When I’m trying to cook something new, I generally start at AllRecipes since it almost always has multiple versions of whatever it is I am planning to make.

Reader’s Digest Association’s no–frills culinary properties are thriving.

By Lauren Streib

July 30, 2009

The site attracting the most attention is Allrecipes.com, a Reader's Digest Association property and a Facebook for foodies. The site is built around 40,000 user-submitted recipes, which are vetted by the allrecipe test kitchen before publication and then scrutinized by other readers. Members with usernames like Soulmama and Happy Apple upload photos and fill the comments sections with recipe tweaks (“double the sauce” and “add more broth”) and exclamation points. Members who pay at least a dollar per month can set up their own blog on the site.

Allrecipes hearkens to the middle American populism that its parent company seems to be leaving behind since announcing plans in June to decrease its rate base and frequency of flagship Reader’s Digest. For now, Allrecipes is working. The site had 9 million unique visitors in June, 10% more than the No. 2 site, foodnetwork.com, and 46% more than the same month last year, according to Web tracking firm Compete. About 70% of its traffic comes from search engines.

“What’s more popular now is real, genuine home cooks sharing their own recipes as opposed to a celebrity-delivered recipe,” says Suzanne Grimes, president of Reader’s Digest Association’s food and entertaining division. According to Grimes, allrecipes is profitable.

Trends seem to be in the site’s favor. Advertising on food Web sites climbed to $53 million in 2008, up 37% from 2007, according to TNS Media Intelligence. According to Forrester Research, ad spending on social media sites is expected to quadruple by 2014 to more than $3 billion. “The social element of these sites is one of the key things a marketer's going to look for,” says Nate Elliott, a principal analyst at Forrester. “For marketers, that’s the holy grail. Consumers trust each other more than any other source of information.”

140 Characters About Food

By Tim Bajarin

May 25, 2009

One of my hobbies is cooking, and I’m a serious seeker of great food. Tell me where to find the world’s best barbecue ribs, fried chicken, Vietnamese pho soup, Filipino adobo, crawfish boil, or oyster po’ boy and I’ll travel hundreds of miles. My hero and role model is Calvin Trillin, the patron saint of foodies; his book The Tummy Trilogy has been a bedside companion for years….

There are three recipe sites I frequent when hunting for the right way to cook something special. One of the best is Epicurious, an extension site for Gourmet and Bon Appétit magazines. It even has an iPhone app, so you can search for recipes and a list of the ingredients you need while at the grocery store. Allrecipes.com has become one of the best places on the Web to get recipes of every ilk—and it too has an iPhone app for easy mobile access. In fact, while a lot of people use their iPhones to check out the weather, stocks, or news, I peruse these two sites the most during idle time. The other site that has become indispensible for me is FoodNetwork. I store my top 50 recipes in its “my recipe” section, which I use often …

100 Top Women in Seattle Tech

May 8, 2009

The technology industry has historically been dominated by men, but the Seattle region is home to an impressive group of women making their mark as computer scientists, researchers, engineers, social media gurus, tech entrepreneurs and executives.

We’re bringing them together for the first time today, in this post. Welcome to our inaugural list of the top women in Seattle technology.

The following information was compiled over several months, starting with reader suggestions before we launched the site. Still, this is just a starting point. We expect it to grow substantially, with continued input from the TechFlash community. We’ll refer to the list as we seek people to profile and interview. And we have more plans in the works to continue developing and building on this theme.

In the meantime, continue reading for what amounts to a remarkable argument against traditional stereotypes about gender in the technology industry. Here’s the list

Lisa Sharples, president of Allrecipes.com. An online marketing veteran who previously served in executive roles at Classmates.com and founded Garden.com.

Web Recipes Are Cooking With Gas

May 5, 2009

Pam Frechette, a Connecticut mother of five, wanted to treat her kids to a Chinese dinner without splurging at a restaurant. So she logged on to Allrecipes.com, and found budget recipes for beef teriyaki, fried rice and egg rolls, saving herself at least $50.

“The economy has really hit us hard," says Ms. Frechette, 29 years old. “We can’t really afford to go eat Chinese food, so we had our own.”

As the recession prompts more people to cut back on expensive meals and dining out, recipe swapping Web sites, particularly those that offer tips for budget meals and cost-cutting, are seeing increases in traffic. Rather than specializing in sophisticated gourmet concoctions, the most popular food sites appeal to a broad audience and allow users to upload their own recipes.

In March, Allrecipes.com, a Reader’s Digest Association Inc. site, became the most visited site in the food category, with about 7.3 million unique visitors, according to comScore Media Metrix. Allrecipes, which is aimed at working moms with a utilitarian approach to cooking, surpassed perennial food Web site leader FoodNetwork.com, owned by Scripps Networks Interactive Inc., with 7.2 million, according to comScore.

In the past year, traffic at MyRecipes.com — a Time Inc. site that pulls recipes from magazine titles like Cooking Light and Southern Living — has almost doubled to 2.9 million unique visitors in March, according to comScore. RecipeZaar.com, another Scripps brand, had roughly 3.3 million visitors in March, down slightly from 3.5 million a year ago, according to comScore. Deanna Brown, president of Scripps Networks Digital, said the company has seen a big increase in traffic to the inexpensive and budget-friendly areas of the site this year.

The popularity of budget-friendly sites comes as visits to some gourmet Web sites decline. In the past year, traffic to Epicurious.com, an online destination for food connoisseurs from Condé Nast Publications Inc., dropped by nearly a million unique visitors to 1.2 million in March, according to comScore. A Condé Nast spokeswoman attributed the decrease to a stronger consumer interest in online destinations of food manufacturers and “seasonal fluctuations.”

Restaurants, too, are losing out. More than six out of 10 restaurant operators saw a decrease in customer traffic in March 2009 from a year earlier, according to the National Restaurant Association. Meanwhile, the number of cookbooks published in 2008 rose to 3,277 new titles up from 2,836 in 2007, according to the most recent data available from Books in Print, which is owned by R.R. Bowker.

Erin Robbins, a 33-year-old health-care consultant from outside of Tampa, Fla., used to go out to restaurants with her husband and 7-year-old daughter three or four nights per week. But about year ago, they looked at their monthly budget and decided to cut costs by restricting outings to Fridays.

To ease the strain of cooking six nights a week, Ms. Robbins says she scans the offerings at Recipezaar, which gives her ideas for new dishes and helps her cook more cost effectively.

An ingredient sorting tool on the site allows users to choose what is already in their pantry instead of taking a trip to the store. Ms. Robbins says she used Recipezaar to learn the technique behind “freezer cooking,” or making massive quantities of a single dish and freezing it in meal-size portions.

Social networking has proven particularly popular with the recipe sites because users can upload recipes directly and share them with one another or within a group. Meredith Corp., publisher of the classic homemaking title Better Homes & Gardens, launched a combination recipe-swapping and social-networking site in January called Mixing Bowl.

The site, at mixingbowl.com encourages communication with a number of groups on the sites, many of which are budget-conscious, with names like Budget Diva, Cheap Eats and Leftover Love. In June, Meredith plans to publish a one-off magazine using the Mixing Bowl brand and user recipes.

Plenty of other recipe-swapping sites that aren’t technically social networks nonetheless offer users the chance to interact through community boards and forums. Rachelle Stratton, of Rock Springs, Wyo., spends two hours a day on tasteofhome.com owned by Reader’s Digest. The site, which reported a 44% increase in traffic to nearly 1.4 million in March, aims to be among the most accessible and budget-friendly on the Web. The recipes use common ingredients found in any grocery store and have a down-home feel. For example, there are more than 100 different recipes for green bean casserole. The site’s Budget Living group has more than 1,000 members.

Likewise, Recipezaar provides a forum for users to exchange ideas and cost-cutting tips. Kathy Dean, a substitute teacher from Plymouth, Mich., recently began looking for ways to trim the food budget for her family of four. In December, Ms. Dean started a thread on Recipezaar asking for tips. “During these challenging economic times,” she wrote, “I would love to know: What are your favorite frugal ideas?”

Ms. Dean received more than 200 responses, ranging from shopping at thrift stores to unplugging appliances. Among the most valuable thing she says she learned was how to pair manufacturer’s coupons with a store’s coupons to get items on deep discount. “I used to just go out and get what I needed,” Ms. Dean says. “But with the economy what it is, I just thought it was time to start saving money.”

Part of the appeal of many recipe sites is that they make cooking accessible and not intimidating. Ms. Stratton, a 28-year-old mother of two, scans tasteofhome.com’s message boards for recipes, ideas and cooking tips every day. She also asks questions about specific ingredients, like the difference between regular flour and pastry flour.

“It’s user-friendly, even for those that are just now starting to stay home and cook,” Ms. Stratton says. “You’re not going to get made fun of if you don’t know what something is.”

Dig Into Site Search for a Goldmine of Data

March 24, 2009

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Site search tools — those oblong boxes on Web sites that let visitors find content specific to keyword queries — offer a wealth of information, according to Aaron Goldman, consultant at Resolution Media

Goldman, who moderated the Monday panel titled “Content Owners: Using On-Site Search to Drive Revenue” at OMMA Global Hollywood, said the search tools can help drive substantial revenue. Participating panelists agreed that their respective initiatives, although different, have helped to increase traffic from Web search engines like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo…

Marketers also can assign business rules to keywords to spotlight promotions and related content that can help cross-sell products and services. From the data, they also can determine the pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) keywords driving site search keywords.

At Allrecipes.com, VP of Brand Marketing Esmee Williams relies on site search for prioritizing what gets published online such as recipes and tips. Editors monitor content based on site searches, while others use the data to design the products. A weekly report identifies the shift in search terms to pinpoint trends. “We’re looking at the data to find different ways to target ads by consumer segments,” she said. “We also are working on the ability to map content based on site searches.” …

3 Ways to Save $100 on Groceries

January 21, 2009

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2007 Consumer Expenditures survey, the average household spends $3,465 on food at home. That’s quite the hefty annual grocery tab — nearly $290 a month.

Saving money on your very next trip to the supermarket needn’t involve poring over the Sunday paper clipping coupons or driving all around town to find the best price on frozen peas. (Though we have included tips on coupon savings strategies at the end of this article for dedicated deal shoppers.) Just remember three simple tips and to easily save as much as $100 on groceries…

More ways to save …

• Make use of the fridge: Take stock of your fridge and experiment with a new recipe. Websites such as Allrecipes.com, Supercook.com, RecipeMatcher.com, and FoodieView.com allow you to input ingredients for a new recipe to try. (Or you can simply type ingredients into your search bar, followed by "recipe" for more recipes.) Maybe that leftover chicken can be used more creatively now! …

iPhone Recipe Apps Surge

January 20, 2009

Allrecipes.com recently introduced a new initiative that will be a boon to its users—and demonstrates yet another way publishers can make their content available using new technologies. The Dinner Spinner is an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that allows users to search content from Allrecipes, access cooking instructions, see photos, and get ratings and reviews. The application is similar to Urbanspoon, a popular app that lets users find local restaurants, showing options in a slot-machine style that mixes and resets when users shake their iPhone up and down. The Dinner Spinner offers iPhone users thousands of recipes and is free.

Allrecipes based its recipe selection on the search behaviors, ratings and reviews of the site’s 10 million monthly visitors. Once a user downloads the app, recipes can be located by selecting a main ingredient, dish type and cook time to see matching recipes. Undecided cooks can shake their iPhone to activate the Dinner Spinner’s slot-machine-style action for “surprise” dish ideas. The app is getting mainly positive reviews, although a common complaint is the lack of search bar.

Top Kitchen Toy? The Cellphone

January 20, 2009

THE tech revolution has been a long time in coming to the kitchen. Our coffee machines are so advanced that they can practically drive us to work, but Internet-controlled toasters and Web-enabled refrigerators became punch lines

One high-tech cooking tool, however, has transformed the kitchen lives of many Americans: the cellphone. It has become the kitchen tool of choice for chefs and home cooks. They use it to keep grocery lists, find recipes, photograph their handiwork, look up the names of French cheeses, set timers for steak and soft-boiled eggs, and convert European or English measurements to American ones.

“It taught me to cook, really,” said Kelli Howell, a college sophomore in Chicago, of her Nokia phone. Its photography, Internet and instant-messaging capabilities let her consult with friends, family and online sources as she got started in the kitchen. “I e-mailed about 20 pictures of a vegetable lasagna to my sister’s phone while I was making it,” she said. “And then I I.M.’ed with my mom about the topping.”…

…As busy as the Kraft Web site is, more than twice as many people visit Allrecipes.com, where most of the content is user-generated and the community rules. (Allrecipes and BigOven both have five-star rating systems, like the one that is so powerful for shoppers at Amazon.com.)

“I used to end up shopping and cooking from memory and making the same five things all the time,” she said. Users choose the course, main ingredient and prep time, and then spin through the various recipe options — or just shake the phone to bring up a random choice. If lamb is on sale, or if artichokes are in season, she can search for recipes that contain both. Depending on the number of stars that recipe has, Ms. Sweeney says, she might try it out.

“I love reading the ratings beforehand and doing the ratings afterwards,” she said. “You do feel like you have shared something with the other people who made that dish, even if you will never meet them.”

The top-rated recipe on Allrecipes.com is one for Banana Banana Bread. Exquisitely plain (and useful, because it uses five or six overripe bananas, not the usual two or three), it has been rated by more than 3,500 cooks. Each review offers comments and variations: a topping here, chocolate chips there, a trick for greasing the pan. That’s feedback from far more cooks than anyone at home leafing through a cookbook, or pulling out mom’s old recipe scribbled on an index card, usually has to go on.

“The status of the family recipe, the chef and the cookbook is definitely changing” said Ms. Lenhart. “The Internet has taken away the gatekeepers, and replaced them with majority rule.”…

Top Kitchen Toy? The Cellphone

January 20, 2009

THE tech revolution has been a long time in coming to the kitchen. Our coffee machines are so advanced that they can practically drive us to work, but Internet-controlled toasters and Web-enabled refrigerators became punch lines.

One high-tech cooking tool, however, has transformed the kitchen lives of many Americans: the cellphone.

It has become the kitchen tool of choice for chefs and home cooks. They use it to keep grocery lists, find recipes, photograph their handiwork, look up the names of French cheeses, set timers for steak and soft-boiled eggs, and convert European or English measurements to American ones.

Allrecipes.com gives culinary advice on iPhone

January 10, 2009

Now that the holidays have come to an end, many people are returning to their time–constrained daily routines.

To help solve confusion in the kitchen, The Dinner Spinner, a new downloadable application for the iPhone and iPod Touch can provide some much-needed relief.

The application is similar to UrbanSpoon, that allows people to find restaurants in their local area. Instead, The Dinner Spinner emphasizes the importance of home cooking. It allows users to look through thousands of recipes based on dish type, ingredients and cook time.

Through Allrecipes.com, users can access recipe instructions, view photos, get ratings and read reviews made by other users. The recipe website uses search behaviours, reviews and ratings from its 10 million monthly visitors to determine its recipe selection.

In UrbanSpoon fashion, users who remain undecided can shake their iPhone to activate The Dinner Spinner’s slot–machine–style feature for a random selection. (Sounds pretty cool).

January 9, 2009

Hey, let’s use Urban Spoon to pick a restaurant to go to.

Nah, I want to cook tonight. Let’s use DinnerSpinner!

DinnerSpinner is an app based on the same idea as Urban Spoon. It let’s you spin (or shake the iPhone) to choose various criteria to match recipes. You can match recipes based on three categories: dish type (main course, bread, cookies, dessert, etc), ingredients (beef, chocolate, fruit, legumes, etc), and preparation time (less than 20 minutes, slow cooker, over an hour, etc). Based on the criteria you “spin” (or select manually) you will get a variety of matching recipes to look through.

Now, before I go any further, yes, sometimes you may get something like “slow cooking cookies made with beef” - and you won’t get any matches.

So once you get your matches (in my example, I am using desserts with fruit in 45 minutes or less) you then hit the button to see your recipe matches. In my example, I got 45 matching recipes. You are taken to a page that shows the recipe name, the reviews (presumably from Allrecipes.com), who submitted the recipe, and a quick, two or three sentence description of the recipe. It also shows a picture of the recipe, which can be nice. To go to the next option, just swipe the screen.

Note, recipes are not exclusive. In my example, I got many recipes that were cookies, even though I had chosen dessert (not cookies) as the dish type. I also got recipes that included chocolate as a ingredient - so recipes are cross listed, which is nice to know.

iPhone Application Review:Allrecipes.com Dinner Spinner

January 08, 2009

Are you an aspiring amateur chef looking for a big hit with the family? Got a BIG dinner with the boss planned and have no idea what to cook? Kid tells you at the last second that you need to bring an appetizer to school that night? If you said YES to any of the above, or if you just want to have a nifty electronic cookbook, then Allrecipes.com Dinner Spinner is the perfect iPhone or iPod Touch application for you.

Dinner Spinner is a small (1.8MB) application for your iPhone or iPod Touch that accesses Allrecipes.com’s database of user-submitted easy-to-make recipes. You pick a type of course, a main component, and the cooking time (or scramble them if you wish) and it finds recipes for you. Take a look at the shopping list, hit the store, and then do some cooking. By connecting to Allrepcipes.com’s database of thousands of homemade recipes, Dinner Spinner is able to give you a large selection, or exactly what you want, in no time at all. Plus, it does this all for free.

The Good

One of the nicest features about Dinner Spinner is the interface. Simplicity is not only a goal of Feng Shui, but it seemed to be the primary philosophy of the application designers. The interface has three real options: a type of meal, a type of ingredient, and a cooking time. That’s it, pure simplicity. The application works perfectly with both the touch features and the accelerometer of the iPhone. If you want to randomize one, two, or even all three parts of the selection process, just shake your phone. This interface along with the great way the application works within the iPhone makes it stand out from the crowd.

Another nice feature is how the recipes are set up. You get a step-by-step guide on how to cook the meal (just like any cookbook) and you get perfect instructions on every aspect. You also will get a shopping list and the full nutrition information. This is helpful to both people at the store and those dieting. Also, there are ratings (as done by other users) that help you decide exactly what you will and will not like. Along with the ratings are user comments that sometimes tell you little hints or add-ins that make the meal even better and easier. Additionally, as all of these recipes are user-submitted, you can trust that they are easy to make and quite tasty.

Recipe Websites Get Fat in Lean Times

Online communities producing new content for budget-concious consumers

January 6, 2009

In tough economic times, consumers are standing the heat by getting into the kitchen. According to comScore, the food sites attracted 45.6 million unique visitors in September 2008, up 10% from 2007—more than double the rate of total Internet growth in the US.

Allrecipes.com led the pack with over 8 million unique visitors in October 2008. The site has had increased traffic since early 2008 and plans to maintain its lead with features and content that cater to consumers with tight budgets and schedules.