VizualBusiness: Forget recipes, Food52 wants to crowdsource cooking itself

Monday, April 30, 2012

Forget recipes, Food52 wants to crowdsource cooking itself

Forget recipes, Food52 wants to crowdsource cooking itself:

Food52 founders Amanda Hesser (left) and Merrill Stubbs

When Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs founded Food52 in 2009 they were looking for a way to create the world’s first crowdsourced cookbook. After 52 weeks (hence the name) of online recipe contests, they had the 140 dishes needed for their cookbook, but they also discovered they had inadvertently created a community of passionate home and professional cooks, all willing to share their recipes and their culinary wisdom.
Since then Food52 has become a premier destination for community-vetted recipes online, but its founders have grown even more ambitious. Hesser and Stubbs want to crowdsource how we actually cook.
In a recent interview with GigaOM, Hesser laid out how Food52 plans to become a central clearinghouse for cooking questions and food knowledge throughout the Web — sort of a Quora or Yahoo Answers for food. The idea is that any time a cook has a question about a specific recipe, technique or general cooking topic, he or she would be able to ask that question from any cooking Website – or from a mobile app or social media site – and get an answer within minutes.

Food52 has already laid out the groundwork with a service called Hotline, which Hesser describes as the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line for any food question. Cooks can ask their questions from Food52’s Website, via Twitter, through its iPhone app or in its iPad cookbook, the Holiday Recipe and Survival Guide. Anyone can respond, as well as agree or disagree with someone else’s answer, but most of the responses come from Food52’s core membership of 50,000 highly active professional and home cooks (who account for roughly 10 percent of its 500,000 monthly unique visitors).
“Right now it’s a very solid proof of concept within our world, but you can imagine how powerful this could be if we integrated it with other sites,” Hesser said. “We want to distribute what we do around the Web. We’re building a widget that can be embedded in food blogs and sites that would expand our reach to much wider audience.”
Whole Foods Market is already experimenting with the platform, incorporating the Hotline into a series of local food portals it’s launching across the country, rebranding the service as FoodPickle. Food52 isn’t working with any other companies or sites just yet. First, Hesser said, it needs to refine and scale its platform.

The recipe for the ultimate repository of cooking knowledge

Currently Food52 is only getting about 20-40 questions a day – though during the holidays volumes increase dramatically — a number that’s easily handled by its membership and moderated by the startup’s small staff of eight. In order to support what it eventually hopes will be thousands of questions a day, Food52 is developing an automated system for streamlining the Q&A and process, identifying which questions pertain to a particular field of cookery and pushing those queries to the relevant experts among its members. For instance, a question about a particular sourdough bread recipe would not only go into the overall question feed, but would be automatically pushed to the recipe’s author and Food52’s baking cognoscenti.

Ultimately, Hesser said, Food 52 wants to get every query answered in as close to real time as possible because people most often have cooking questions while they’re actually cooking. A 20-minute response lag to the question “how do I know when my quiche is done?” doesn’t do you much good if your quiche is already burning.
“Over the Christmas holidays we saved a lot of meals,” Hesser said, but she added Food52 can do better. “One challenge for us to get that critical mass of activity necessary to get questions answered in less than 5 minutes.”
Next, Food52 is trying to refine how questions are asked. While users can submit general hotline queries via its web and app tools, Food52 is embedding code into its recipes pages that allows customers to ask questions about specific ingredients, techniques or steps described within those recipes. The engine then loads that relevant information into the posted question itself, making it easier for Food52’s members to provide very specific answers. Hesser said Food52 will eventually expand those capabilities to its partners.

Food52 is also building a database of questions and highly-rated answers, giving users instant access to a repository of stored knowledge about particular recipes or techniques. The more people use Hotline, the smarter it becomes, Hesser said. And finally, the startup is looking to take advantage of its higher-profile members to provide both authority and nuance to some of the more complex queries fielded by the site. Food52 has designated a group 10 famous chefs, food writers and cookbook authors such as Michael Ruhlman and Dorie Greenspan as “MVPs”.
“There are a lot of fantastic food questions out there, but some of these questions require experience to answer,” said Hesser, who is no slouch herself (she authored the Essential New York Times Cookbook). “A lot of questions don’t have simple fact-based answers … The idea isn’t that what [the MVPs] have to say is necessarily more important than what others have to say, but we do want to add their knowledge to the conversation.”
Hesser didn’t reveal any details about the business model behind Food52’s expansion across the Web, though she did say the plan isn’t to provide a white label service to other food brands. The New York City-based startup hopes to make hotline its own pervading presence, drawing more people into the Food52 universe.
Food52 may also face some competition. In a recent conversation, Food Network’s SVP of online brand brands Bob Madden said FN is looking to make some big moves in its digital content strategy, including a possible cooking question and answer service of its own.
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