Yummly Launches World's First Semantic Search Platform for Food and Recipes

First there was Netflix for movies, then came Pandora for music. Now Yummly, the company that is pioneering semantic food search, is applying a similar methodology to recipes. Less than two months after it quietly introduced its public beta, the company today announced the official launch of Yummly.com, unveiling an enhanced interface and feature set that make the user experience richer and more social. The company will be rolling out additional features and enhancements to its cooking platform over the next few weeks. Yummly also revealed that its growing database now offers 500,000 recipes, aggregated from leading recipe sites and all over the web -- all of which are searchable by ingredient, diet, allergy, nutrition, price, cuisine, time, taste, meal courses and sources. Yummly is emerging as the premier online destination for the more than 200 million cooking enthusiasts in America today.

"In the past six years alone, food has consistently remained among the three leading consumer search categories year over year, ahead of travel, real estate and shopping," said Bruce Shaw, a Yummly investor and President of The Harvard Common Press, one of the nation's premier publishers of cookbooks. "As more content moves online, Yummly offers a unique and intelligent approach to recipe search that will bring great value to consumers and offer significant business potential for traditional content producers. With over half of American households cooking at home more frequently, Yummly is a much-needed tool in any cooking enthusiast's kitchen. It's what online recipe search has been lacking for quite some time."

An Intelligent Way to Interact With Food
Founded in 2009 by internet startup veteran David Feller, whose resume includes key executive positions at Half.com, StumbleUpon and eBay, Yummly is the first website to apply algorithms and semantic search to recipes. It uniquely 'understands' food on a variety of levels (taste, ingredient, dietary appropriateness, potential allergens, etc.) and 'learns' about users based on their likes and dislikes, developing a deeper understanding each time they use it. This enables Yummly to make personalized recipe suggestions containing only those foods the user want.

"We started by solving the problem of how people decide what to eat, so it works for anyone, regardless of whether they prefer specific ingredients, need something quick and easy, are trying to find nutritious and affordable meals, or just looking to be inspired." said David Feller, Founder and CEO of Yummly. "That's the beauty of Yummly: there's something there for everyone."

More Than Just Another Cooking Website
Designed with simplicity and usability in mind, Yummly marries high tech with common sense to provide a vastly improved user experience over other cooking sites. The result is a platform that's fun and easy to navigate for cooks of every skill level, and makes discovering and customizing recipes a snap.

"I'm always on the lookout for great recipe sources to share with my readers. Yummly.com gets to know what you like, easily expanding any cook's repertoire," said former chef, Jennifer Segal, a mother of two and author of OnceUponaChef.com, a popular food blog named one of Saveur Magazine's 'Sites We Love.' "For families that have food allergies or picky eaters to consider, like mine, Yummly is an answer to our prayers. And I love Yummly's social networking component: TasteBuds. It's like Facebook for foodies."

Some of the new features and enhancements coming to the Yummly food platform include:

• Improved FoodFinder: provides search by a variety of methods, including ingredient, diet, allergy, nutrition, price, cuisine, time, taste, course and source. The FoodFinder even understands dietary preferences, including gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian, pescetarian, and many more.


• Edit Recipes: edit and save any recipe with ingredient substitutions and adjustments based on your preferences -- nutrition statistics automatically recalculate to reflect changes.


• Meet Your 'TasteBuds': Yummly's built-in social networking feature, TasteBuds, now provides expanded navigation capabilities, allowing users to interact, share recipes, and friend one another to build a social community based on a shared passion for cooking.


• Enhanced Recommendations: get more delicious, taste-specific recommendations based on your interaction with recipes on the site.


• Facebook Integration: helps users to find and invite their friends on Facebook to become a TasteBud and share recipes.


• Universal Recipe Box: drawing from its massive database of more than 500,000 recipes gathered from today's leading cooking websites, popular cookbooks and best chefs, Yummly has something for everyone. Users can now import favorite recipes from other websites and save them in their Yummly recipe box.


• Video Tutorials: offering helpful instruction in a tasteful and concise video format and contextually integrated into recipes, Yummly educates users on how to perform the cooking and food preparation techniques called for in recipes.

• Custom Built Food Processer: proprietary technology gives Yummly the unique ability to look at food and recipes, and 'understand' them.


• Real-time Nutritional Calculator: Yummly calculates individual nutritional statistics based on the ingredients and quantities called for in a recipe, allowing it to automatically recalculate and update the statistics in real-time when a substitution is made.


• Semantic Search: improves recipe search accuracy over other recipe sites by understanding a user's food intent and contextual meaning, ultimately generating more relevant results.


• Predictive Intelligence: 'learns' what users like to eat to offer them customized, taste-specific recommendations based on their preferences.