Author Archives: Dave
Yummly – A search engine to solve mealtime indecision (Thrillist)
Yummly Launches World’s First Semantic Search Platform for Food and Recipes
Offers a Better Way to Find, Organize, Customize, and Share Recipes With Intelligent Search Across More Than 500,000 of the Best Recipes Online
REDWOOD CITY, CA–(Marketwire – June 22, 2010) – 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 torecipe 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.
Key technology features of Yummly include:
- 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.
“Building software that can surprise and delight your user is really hard to do, but it’s critical for developing a breakthrough company,” said Brad O’Neill, a Yummly investor and CEO of TechValidate, a leading marketing content automation firm. “Yummly’s core technology is all about making those surprises happen for its users, easily and naturally. It’s a totally different way of thinking about food.”
Recipe for Success: A Who’s Who of Investors and Advisors
Supported by a winning team comprised of notable high tech startup alumni, leading-edge engineers, developers, and angel investors — all with impressive track records of success across the consumer, food, high tech and marketing sectors — Yummly is poised for success. Its founding angel investors and advisory board include: Michael Dearing, Harrison Metal Capital; Jeff Jordan, CEO of OpenTable; Bruce Shaw, President of The Harvard Common Press; Bill Cobb, former President of eBay, and a former executive of PepsiCo and Yum! Brands; Brad O’Neill, CEO, TechValidate and founding investor of StumbleUpon; and Justin LaFrance and Geoff Smith, co-Founders of StumbleUpon.
“There are limitless places for us to take the Yummly platform as we continue to develop it, and an unlimited supply of content for us to leverage,” said Feller.
For more information, or to start your own unique culinary adventure with Yummly, visitwww.yummly.com.
About Yummly
Founded in 2009 by foodies on a mission to invent a better way to find, modify, share and store recipes, Yummly.com is the world’s first semantic search platform for food and a premier destination for cooking enthusiasts of all skill levels. Empowering individuals to discover recipes based on their personal tastes and preferences, Yummly offers more than 500,000 of the most popular recipes, aggregated from leading recipe sites and all over the web.
Find out what’s cooking at Yummly: visit the Yummly blog: blog.yummly.com, connect on Facebook www.facebook.com/yummly, or follow on Twitter www.twitter.com/yummly.
Yummly, FoodFinder and TasteBuds are trademarks of Yummly Inc. and may be registered in some jurisdictions. All other trade names or trademarks used herein are recognized to be the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.
Yummly Home Page
FoodFinder
TasteBud
Yummly Tries to Lure Cookbook Publishers (Publishers Weekly)
Yummly’s Semantic Search Engine Is The Ultimate Online Cookbook For Foodies (TechCrunch)
Defining Delicious – Introduction and Truffle Substitution
Black Truffle
Hi, my name is Andrew Eichenbaum, and I am a Foodie… I am also the “Mad Scientist”/Analytics Engineer here at Yummly. In a nutshell, I deal with anything on Yummly that is data-driven either directly or in an advisory position, e.g.: recipe suggestions, taste matching, data quality. etc. This means most of my life behind the keyboard is spent trying to turn everything food into something a computer can understand. This gives me a unique position in that almost every day I am able to find out some new tidbits of knowledge buried in our data. Those tidbits are what we turn into the algorithms that help power Yummly. “Defining Delicious” will be a series of posts that bring out specific points or objects of note that I have found in the data.
So, let start with Truffles… Truffles are one of the most prized ingredients for their smoky, savory, and earthy taste. But, at $600 to $700 dollars a pound, it is not an ingredient that many of us can use in much quantity.
This brings us to truffle oil. Most of us use an olive oil-based truffle oil when we want to add the truffle flavor. Yet, most, if not all, of the flavor from truffle oil comes from a derived organic compound, 2,4-Dithiapentane. So, since we are already using a substitute for truffles in our “truffle oil”, why bother spending $20 on a 2 ounce bottle.
Something I came across in my work is that cloves and Worcestershire sauce were used in similar situations as truffles and truffle oil. It lead me to believe that you could substitute one of these for truffles. Being a bit of a skeptic of my own work, I decided to test out my theory by setting up an experiment. I used truffle oil as a control, comparing it to olive oil I had infused with whole cloves, and olive oil with a bit of Worcestershire sauce added.
The results were astounding, in that the clove infused oil had initial taste of truffle oil, while the Worcestershire sauce/oil mixture had the ending taste of truffle oil. And, when we compared an even mixture of the clove and Worcestershire sauce oils, we had something that tasted very much like the truffle oil. Now I won’t claim that this is a perfect substitution that will fool anybody, but the same taste was there, at a fraction of the cost.
You might want to try finding something on Yummly with truffles and playing around.
You Make It Hurt So Good
Due to the overwhelming response from the Tasting Table article, some of you may have experienced an error when trying to register for Yummly today. The problem has been fixed, and the email address/member name and password combination you registered with will now work.
Some of you may have also experienced an issue using the “Without” feature in the FoodFinder (e.g. without “seafood”). That problem has been resolved, as well as a few other small issues you brought to our attention.
Also, a little clarification on how ingredients work since we received some inquiries about that today. “Seafood” includes all types of fish and shellfish, “Herbs” includes all types of herbs, and so on… Yummly understands ingredients and groups of food, and lets you include/exclude them easily. If you find something that isn’t working quite right in the food information, just send us an email to food@yummly.com and we’ll fix it.
If for some reason you are still experiencing site issues, please contact us here or send an email to support@yummly.com. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but in the end we hope you’ll find Yummly was worth the wait.
Thanks!
~ The Yummly Team
Dinner Diviner – A recipe searcher that knows you best (Tasting Table)
OMG – It’s Candied Orange Peel Day!
Candied Orange Peel
Tomorrow, May 4, marks Candied Orange Peel Day. Not only is it a day to celebrate Orange Peels, but it is also National Orange Juice day and National Homebrew day.
It seems that almost every day has some sort of food holiday. While it seems sort of crazy, you quickly realize that there are many more foods than days in a year. Our database contains 15,000 foods and that’s just scratching the surface.
There are a variety of resources to help you keep on top of what’s happening and when. Here are a couple that I have been using - National Food Holiday Directory and American Food Holidays. I am personally looking forward to August which is National Peach Month.
Some of the other days celebrated in May are:
May 1: National Chocolate Parfait Day
May 2: National Truffles Day
May 3 National Chocolate Custard Day
May 3: National Raspberry Tart Day
May 4: National Homebrew Day
May 4: National Orange Juice Day
May 4: National Candied Orange Peel Day
May 5: Cinco de Mayo
May 5: National Hoagie Day
May 6: National Crêpes Suzette Day
May 6: International No Diet Day
May 7: National Roast Leg of Lamb Day
May 8 National Coconut Cream Pie Day
May 8: National Empanada Day
May 8: Have A Coke Day
May 9: National Butterscotch Brownie Day
May 10: National Shrimp Day
May 11: Eat What You Want Day
May 12: National Nutty Fudge Day
May 13 National Apple Pie Day
May 13: National Fruit Cocktail Day
May 14: National Buttermilk Biscuit Day
May 15: National Chocolate Chip Day
May 16: National Coquilles St. Jacques Day
May 17: National Cherry Cobbler Day
May 18: National Cheese Soufflé Day
May 19: National Devil’s Food Cake Day
May 20: National Quiche Lorraine Day
May 20: Pick Strawberries Day
May 21: National Strawberries and Cream Day
May 22: National Vanilla Pudding Day
May 23: National Taffy Day
May 24: National Escargot Day
May 25 National Brown-Bag-It Day
May 25: National Wine Day
May 26: National Blueberry Cheesecake Day
May 26: National Cherry Dessert Day
May 27: National Grape Popsicle Day
May 28: National Brisket Day
May 29: National Coq Au Vin Day
May 30: National Mint Julep Day
May 31: National Macaroon Day
Just the beginning…
yummly.com
Our launch a few days ago was a huge day for the Yummly team. Or as we like to put it, we’ve “served the main course”. Ironically, this is just the beginning.
The idea stemmed from the convergence of two thoughts “I hate mustard” and “Pandora for food”. Plus, we had become frustrated with the lack of innovation and progress in the online food world. Maybe it was that the web (as we know it today) was burned early on by grocery delivery companies, or maybe it was that the right people weren’t involved. Either way, we’ve decided to do something about it.
The core of what we have built is a semantic food platform. Those are just sophisticated words for the fact that we know food. If you type in the word “herb”, we know that thyme, basil, tarragon, oregano, and so on, are all herbs. But by knowing food, we can also get a better understanding of you and what you like. This results in a ton of really cool features.
Please try out Yummly and let us know what you think. We’ll keep improving based on your feedback, so please be sure to provide a lot of it. You can send your ideas through the Feedback link at the bottom of every page, or you can send an email to ideas@yummly.com. We look forward to hearing from you.