Food + Tech Competition for the Developer Community Will Spotlight the Yummly API

San Francisco and Palo Alto, CA – April 5, 2013 –Yummly (www.yummly.com) the leading digital kitchen and recipe search platform, today announced that it will be a sponsor at FoodHackathon, a groundbreaking San Francisco event bringing together food entrepreneurs and tech leaders to build new products and tools to improve the food ecosystem. Yummly CEO and co-founder David Feller and Head of Mobile and Platform Brian Witlin will also serve as mentors at the event to provide guidance and ideas to participants.

“Yummly’s vision is to give food lovers the best tools they need, whether on the go or in the kitchen. FoodHackathon is a great event in which to connect with developers who share the same ideals and understand that food brings people together,” said David Feller, CEO and Founder of Yummly. “The opportunities for innovation and disruption in the food arena are vast, and this event gives creative minds a chance to cross-pollinate ideas that can make a difference for the greater food community.”

The event opens hot on the heels of the release of Yummly’s API Platform for food and recipes, which leverages algorithms, collaborative filtering and intelligent search to structure and analyze massive recipe data sets from across the open web.

“FoodHackathon is the first of its kind event empowering engineers and designers to build products and tools to innovate and improve the food ecosystem,” said Matthew Wise, FoodHackathon Cofounder. “Yummly is a leading edge example of a food startup that leverages data and user experience to empower consumers who are passionate about food. The Yummly API is a major step forward in bringing food and recipes into the modern era to make the digital kitchen a reality.”

Hackathon participants will have full access to the Yummly API during the event to build on Yummly’s cache of nearly 1B data points and whip up fresh, creative concepts and applications around Yummly’s predictive and semantic semantic search technology.

The event takes place April 6 – 7, 2013 at SOMA Central in San Francisco. Yummly will be joined by other sponsors, including Dave McClure  (500 Startups), Danielle Gould (Food + Tech Connect/Forbes), Wade Roush (Xconomy) and representatives from the San Francisco Mayor’s Office, among others. 

A special prize will be awarded to the team that comes up with the most innovative usage of the Yummly API.

About Yummly
Yummly’s mission is to create the ultimate digital kitchen platform. Headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley, Yummly is backed by Physic Ventures, Unilever Corporate Ventures, First Round Capital, Harrison Metal Capital, Intel Capital, and The Harvard Common Press.  Its founding angel investors and advisory board include: Jeff Jordan (partner at Andreessen Horowitz), Bill Cobb (CEO, H&R Block), Justin LaFrance (StumbleUpon), Marcia Hooper and Brad O’Neill (CEO, TechValidate). For more information, visitYummly (http://www.yummly.com).

Connect with Yummly:
Read theYummly Nibbles & Bits blog (http://www.yummly.com/blog/)
VisitYummly on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/yummly)
FollowYummly on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/yummly)

Yummly is a trademark 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.

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Media Contact
Olivia Hine
Bhava Communications for Yummly
yummly@bhavacom.com
415-846-6095

Application Platform Powers Integration of Recipes to the Global Food Community

PALO ALTO, CA – March 20, 2013 – Yummly (http://www.yummly.com), the leading digital kitchen and recipe search platform, today announced the official launch of the Yummly API. The Yummly API provides access to over 1M recipes to display relevant results that can be tailored according to individual ingredient, diet, allergy, nutrition, taste and technique parameters, allowing developers to build world-class applications that are powered by user preferences.

“At Yummly, our vision is to expand access to our API to provide a wide array of on-the-go formats for food and recipe lovers of all kinds,” said Brian Witlin, Head of Mobile and Platform. “By officially opening up the Yummly API platform, we arm the developer community with valuable data that can be unlocked, repurposed and scaled to answer specific queries revolving around ingredients and recipes.”

Leveraging algorithms, collaborative filtering and intelligent search to structure and analyze massive recipe data sets from across the open web, Yummly’s customized user data encompasses a vast and evolving database for semantic search and discovery. The unveiling of the API coincides with an upsurge in interest in slicing and dicing recipe data for a variety of apps and sites, as APIs continue to encourage innovation and collaboration amongst third-party customers and clients.

“As a general purpose search engine, DuckDuckGo is excited to work with Yummly to provide our users with excellent recipe and food-related instant answers,” said Gabriel Weinberg, Founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo. “Yummly’s semantic search technology provides direct links to relevant and compelling food and recipe results for our users, making for a great recipe search user experience on DuckDuckGo.”

Yummly’s robust technology that can be deployed in variety of verticals, including:

● Real-time Semantic Search – Search indexing leads to targeted and featured results triggered by food/recipe searches
● Weight Loss/ Tracking – Nutrition information and calorie counting are simple with diet indexing
● Allergy Identification – Search based on food allergies such as gluten, dairy, nuts, other ingredients/food types
● Shopping – Easy real-time recipe and product search, plus shopping list creation
● Cooking and Meal Planning – Search recipe and ingredient data by cuisine, taste, techniques, or courses
● Food Branding – Logo usage for brand message enhancement and product targeting
● Social Sharing – Social sharing, comments, and other customer engagement features

“An integral component of our coupon application is to create better ways for shoppers to plan and execute trips to the grocery store,” said Peter Michailidis, Co-founder and CMO of Pushpins. “Integrated with our existing platform, the Yummly API greatly enhances Pushpins’ mobile capabilities, offering users intuitive recipe and nutrition information on the go for a more seamless shopping experience.”

Yummly will offer API plans for both commercial and non-commercial use beginning on March 20, 2013. Yummly’s API management and distribution support will be provided by 3scale.

Resources
● For a free test of the Yummly API, please visit: https://developer.yummly.com/
● For more information about Yummly, please visit: http://www.yummly.com/blog/about/

About Yummly
Yummly’s mission is to create the ultimate digital kitchen platform. Headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley, Yummly is backed by Physic Ventures, Unilever Corporate Ventures, First Round Capital, Harrison Metal Capital, Intel Capital, and The Harvard Common Press. Its founding angel investors and advisory board include: Jeff Jordan (partner at Andreessen Horowitz), Bill Cobb (CEO, H&R Block), Justin LaFrance (StumbleUpon), Marcia Hooper and Brad O’Neill (CEO, TechValidate). For more information, visit www.yummly.com.

Connect with Yummly:
Read the Yummly Nibbles & Bits blog: http://www.yummly.com/blog/
Visit us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/yummly
Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/yummly

Yummly is a trademark 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.

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Media Contact
Olivia Hine
Bhava Communications for Yummly
yummly@bhavacom.com

Founder and CEO David Feller Will Discuss How Food, Technology and Social Media Converge

New York City, NY – February 20, 2013 – Yummly (http://www.yummly.com), the leading digital kitchen and recipe search platform, today announced that Founder and CEO David Feller will be a panelist at Social Media Week. Hosted by leading advertising agency JWT at their New York headquarters, the panel, entitled “What’s On Your Plate?: How Digital Has Evolved Our Palates,” will address the ways technology has transformed our modern relationship with food, and how media and brands are adapting to those changes.

“Social Media Week is all about game changers and disrupters in the social space,” said Dave Feller, CEO of Yummly. “At Yummly, we’re constantly seeking new ways to connect people with the best food experiences they can have, whether they’re looking for offbeat recipes with specialty ingredients or insight into our evolving technology, or sharing their customized discoveries online or on the go. We’re excited to be a participant on this panel and shine light on the evolution of food both on and offline.”

Featuring fellow representatives from Studiofeast and Nestlé, as well as popular food blog FoodTechConnect.com, the panel will explore how the first generation of game-changing food/tech companies have paved the way for the next set of technologies and social ideas that will digitize experiences with the art and craft of food. JWT Digital Strategy Director Jinal Shah will act as moderator for the discussion.

“When we sought representatives of the cutting edge of food and technology, Yummly came to mind immediately,” says Jinal Shah, Digital Strategy Director at JWT.“The company’s technology and customized approach to discovering and sharing recipes and ingredients online is representative of the major shift we are seeing as food, technology and social media converge.”

The “What’s On Your Plate?: How Digital Has Evolved Our Palates” panel will run from 12:00 to 1:30 pm today at JWT’s Advertising and Marketing Hub, located at 466 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

Resources

• For more information on the “What’s on Your Plate” panel, please visit: http://socialmediaweek.org/newyork/events/?id=56934#.UR2DvolesVl
• To learn more about Social Media Week, please visit: http://socialmediaweek.org

About Yummly
Yummly’s mission is to create the ultimate digital kitchen platform. Headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley, Yummly is backed by Physic Ventures, Unilever Corporate Ventures, First Round Capital, Harrison Metal Capital, Intel Capital, and The Harvard Common Press.  Its founding angel investors and advisory board include: Jeff Jordan (partner at Andreessen Horowitz), Bill Cobb (CEO, H&R Block), Justin LaFrance (StumbleUpon), Marcia Hooper and Brad O’Neill (CEO, TechValidate). For more information, visit Yummly (http://www.yummly.com).

Connect with Yummly:
Read the Yummly Nibbles & Bits blog (http://www.yummly.com/blog/)
Visit Yummly on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/yummly)
Follow Yummly on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/yummly)

Yummly is a trademark 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.

Media Contact
Olivia Hine
Bhava Communications for Yummly
yummly@bhavacom.com

Veteran Entrepreneur to Lead Ongoing Development of World’s Fastest Growing Food Site

PALO ALTO, CA – February 6, 2013 – Yummly, the leading digital kitchen platform, today announced the appointment of Brian Witlin as Head of Mobile and Platform. In this role, Witlin will lead platform growth initiatives and the development of Yummly’s next-generation mobile applications in 2013, as well as expansion of the Yummly API Developer program and network.

Brian Witlin is a veteran entrepreneur who most recently served as the CEO and Founder of ShopWell. He also holds EIR (Entrepreneur in Residence) positions at IDEO and StartX and serves as a startup mentor for 500 Startups seed venture fund, Insidr and Diamond MMA. Witlin is a graduate of Lehigh University with a bachelor’s degree in Business and Economics and received a Master of Science in Engineering and Design from Stanford University. He has also participated as a lecturer at Stanford University’s Hasso Platner Institute of Design.

“Brian Witlin has a killer combination: a deep knowledge of product strategy and a love of all things food. He is in lockstep with the Yummly vision to empower our users and provide them with a seamless shopping, cooking and eating experience, at home or on the go,” said David Feller, Founder and CEO of Yummly. “In the past two and half years, the multi-faceted Yummly food platform has rapidly evolved in order to give chefs, home cooks and foodies of all stripes the ability to search and discover the best recipes from across the web. Brian’s leadership and expertise will be an undeniable asset in leading Yummly into the company’s next phase of growth.”

Yummly offers a dynamic tool for food lovers everywhere to customize searches based off of personalized ingredient, diet, allergy, nutrition, cuisine, time, taste, meal, course and source parameters. Yummly’s semantic search capabilities improve recipe search accuracy over other recipe sites by understanding a user’s food intent and contextual meaning, ultimately generating more relevant results.

“Yummly understands that food is personal and provides a robust, intuitive way for users to discover the recipes and foods they love,” said Brian Witlin, Head of Mobile and Platform. “With over 10 million users and a great internal team in place, Yummly is well-positioned to capitalize on its growth in order to serve up a meaningful digital food experience. I see unlimited opportunities to integrate into the fabric of our digital ecosystem, allowing other food enthusiasts to leverage and harness the power of Yummly’s technology.”

Witlin’s appointment marks the first major company milestone of 2013, continuing the forward momentum jumpstarted by the unveiling of the Yummly site redesign and the introduction of Yummly’s native, online advertising platform in October of 2012. He joins a top tier team of fellow foodies, including Patricia Ng (Head of Business, formerly of Sheyna, eBay and Bain); Kate Holmes (Head of International, formerly of Frog Design) and Suzanne Pilkington (Head of Finance & HR, formerly of Drobo), in addition to other recent hires from Google, Yahoo, Foodily and Rearden Commerce.

About Yummly
Yummly’s mission is to create the ultimate digital kitchen platform. Headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley, Yummly is backed by Physic Ventures, Unilever Corporate Ventures, First Round Capital, Harrison Metal Capital, Intel Capital, and The Harvard Common Press.  Its founding angel investors and advisory board include: Jeff Jordan (partner at Andreessen Horowitz), Bill Cobb (CEO, H&R Block), Justin LaFrance (StumbleUpon), Marcia Hooper and Brad O’Neill (CEO, TechValidate). For more information, visit www.yummly.com.

Connect with Yummly:
Read the Yummly Nibbles & Bits blog: http://www.yummly.com/blog/
Visit us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/yummly
Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/yummly

Yummly is a trademark 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.

Media Contact
Olivia Hine
Bhava Communications for Yummly
yummly@bhavacom.com
415-846-6095

Fastest Growing Food Site’s Native Advertising Enhances User Search and Discovery, Increases Relevancy for Food and Beverage Partners

PALO ALTO, CA – October 10, 2012 – Yummly, the leading digital kitchen and recipe search platform, today announced Yummly Advertising, the company’s new advertising platform for food and beverage brands. Available in the next few days, Yummly Advertising provides a unique opportunity for brands and marketers to engage with prospective consumers in an integrated manner.

“The native Yummly Advertising platform represents the next evolution in online advertising for food, providing an ad component that is highly relevant, seamlessly integrated and useful,“ says David Feller, CEO of Yummly. “Yummly Advertising builds upon Yummly’s position as the leading digital kitchen platform, providing brands a unique opportunity to serving up comprehensive product suggestions to the Yummly community.”

Integrating contextual ads from current partners such as Hellmann’s, Ragu and Breyer’s, Yummly Advertising draws from the site’s extensive semantic search data cache to tailor relevant ads to individual users based on their search terms and taste preferences.

At its core, the Yummly’s Advertising Platform addresses the following key components:

• Scale: With 7.5M unique monthly visitors and growing, Yummly provides an opportunity to advertise to an extensive and growing base of food lovers in a compelling manner.

• Integration: Rather than standard display and text advertising which often competes with the user experience, Yummly Advertising’s native placements are deftly integrated within the look and feel of the Yummly interface. By incorporating featured recipes or products related to search, brands can expect higher click-through rates and more meaningful brand engagement.

• Relevancy:  Yummly’s technology and understanding of food powers the relevancy algorithms.  The targeting incorporates elements of ingredients, taste, cuisine, course, diet, allergy, nutrition and more.  For instance, an Apple Pie search could not only result in flour, sugar and apple ads, but also suggestions for ice cream and whipped cream.

• Personalization:  Yummly automatically updates brand and product placement according to user preferences, showcasing recipes and products based off users’ taste and allergy information.

“We’re excited to be part of Yummly Advertising,” said Gail Tifford, Senior Director of Media at Unilever. “Not only is Yummly the fastest growing food website in the world, but it is a global platform that offers something highly contextual, valuable and truly unique for our brands.”
Promoted areas will allow brands to live on the Yummly digital food platform, providing intuitive channels through which to engage directly with users in real time, including:

• Suggested Products: Applicable products from partner brands will appear embedded within the recipe search pages, creating a seamless search and discovery experience.

• Promoted Recipes: Relevant recipes that directly reflect users’ comprehensive taste profiles and search terms will appear at the top of Yummly search results.

• Brand Centers: Brands will have a central presence on the Yummly site, where they can share their individual brand stories and showcase recipes, products, promotions and campaigns.

• Social Media Integration:  All Yummly Advertising components will have automatic integration with social media.  As part of the Facebook Open Graph initiative, Yummly’s Yum button provides a direct integration between advertised products and consumers’ social media profiles. When users “Yum” a branded recipe, that endorsement will seamlessly appear as a post on the individual’s Facebook Timeline and Newsfeed.

About Yummly
Yummly’s mission is to create the ultimate digital kitchen platform. Headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley, Yummly is backed by Physic Ventures, Unilever Corporate Ventures, First Round Capital, Harrison Metal Capital, Intel Capital, and The Harvard Common Press. Its founding angel investors and advisory board include: Jeff Jordan (partner at Andreessen Horowitz) Bill Cobb (CEO, H&R Block), Justin LaFrance (StumbleUpon), Marcia Hooper and Brad O’Neill (CEO, TechValidate). For more information, visit www.yummly.com.

Connect with Yummly:
Read the Yummly Nibbles & Bits blog: http://www.yummly.com/blog/

Visit us on Facebook www.facebook.com/yummly
Follow us on Twitter www.twitter.com/yummly

Yummly and Yummly Advertising 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.

Media Contact
Olivia Hine
Bhava Communications for Yummly
yummly@bhavacom.com

Powerful New Site Redesign Delivers Cutting-Edge User Experience and Technology

PALO ALTO, CA – October 10, 2012 – Yummly, the leading digital kitchen and recipe search platform, today announced the launch of their redesigned website for their over 7.5 million unique visitors. Announced in conjunction with Yummly’s new revolutionary native advertising platform, Yummly Advertising, the new Yummly unveils a fresh design that delivers an easy, beautiful and innovative experience for the more than 183M cooking enthusiasts in America today.

“The evolution of Yummly boils down to one simple ingredient – the user. The Yummly redesign sets the stage for the continued expansion and evolution of the Yummly digital kitchen platform to become an invaluable online resource for foodies and cooks of all skill levels,” says David Feller. “With over 7.5 million visitors to the site, the new and improved Yummly delivers on this core vision to provide an intuitive, visually-rich tool for each person to discover the recipes they love and enjoy based on their taste preferences.”

Recipes Redesigned: Yummly’s New Take on Cooking
Launched in April of 2010 by cofounders David Feller and Vadim Geshel, Yummly’s food and recipe platform understands recipes from across the Internet and match them with its users’ tastes.

Designed with simplicity and usability in mind, the new Yummly redesign mixes a scoop of high tech and a healthy dash of user feedback to provide a vastly improved user experience. The company will also be rolling out additional features and enhancements to the site over the next few weeks.

New features of the Yummly Ultimate Kitchen Tool include:

• New Branding: Created to evoke the true essence of Yummly, the new Yummly logo reminds users to just say “Yum” as they peruse the best recipes from notable cookbooks, bloggers and food sites from across the web.

• A Remodeled Digital Kitchen:  The new and improved Yummly features a fresh, dynamic visual interface for food lovers everywhere. Seasoned chefs and novice cooks can customize their searches, based off their tastes and dietary needs, paving the way for the ultimate personalized recipe collection.

• Yummly Ratings:  Incorporating ratings and reviews from a variety of sources across the web – including popular food sites, social media channels and from within the Yummly community – Yummly’s standardized recipe ratings system analyzes user feedback, source reputation and social media impact of the recipe to provide the most comprehensive assessment of a recipe’s quality.

• The Yum Button & Social Integration: As part of their individual settings, users can utilize the pervasive Yum button to share their discoveries and favorite recipes on Facebook. Simply “Yum” a recipe and that endorsement will seamlessly appear as an update on the user’s Facebook Timeline and Newsfeed through Facebook Open Graph.

• Enhanced Imagery: Care to see what’s cooking? The new Yummly interface understands that sight is as important a sense as taste when it comes to meal preparation, offering over 100,000 new vivid, mouthwatering photographs from various recipe source sites to spotlight the visual experience of cooking and eating.

• More Cooks In the Kitchen: Yummly is adding additional recipe sources, so food lovers can do one universal search to find their perfect recipe versus visiting multiple sites.  With our exclusive Yummly rating, deciding which recipe will be easier than ever.

• Yummly Advertising: Yummly Advertising’s native online advertising platform features integrated, contextual and useful ad placement within recipe search results, providing the Yummly cooking community with comprehensive brand suggestions.

• What’s on the Menu at Yummly? Yummly’s approach to 2013 will take the user out of the kitchen and into the market. Whether it’s the supermarket, farmers’ market or specialty market, Yummly’s multi-layered mobile strategy will enable users to efficiently shop and plan for their meals.

Yummly’s Digital Kitchen Platform: The Key Ingredients
Yummly offers a growing database of over 500k recipes, aggregated from leading recipe sites, cookbooks and advanced partnerships from leading food and beverage brands – all of which are searchable by ingredient, diet, allergy, nutrition, price, cuisine, time, taste, meal courses and sources. Yummly’s semantic search capabilities improve recipe search accuracy over other recipe sites by understanding a user’s food intent and contextual meaning, ultimately generating more relevant results.

With an active community of over 7.5M users and counting, the adjustment and analysis of these recipe parameters to suit individual needs can generate large sets of personalized search data in real-time. To accommodate this continuous growth of data, and to harness insights from it, Yummly’s digital food platform underwent notable foundational changes, with the majority of the technology stack built using open source software.

Yummly’s new architecture features the following new technologies:

• Web-services: The Yummly development team constructed the new site by utilizing Yummly’s publicly available APIs.  Taking full advantage of these web services, Yummly engineers plan to serve as an influence to and collaborate with other third party developers.

• Node.js. Infrastructure: The Yummly development team leveraged Node.js to develop both the front and back-end codebase. Blurring the distinction between the two codebases, this strategy leveraged skill sets between the two codebase areas and maximized the entire engineering team, resulting in a faster development cycle.

• Faster Search: The Yummly team also invested time and resources in their search infrastructure, improving search performance 5x.

“Yummly has leveraged open source software and advanced algorithms to deliver unprecedented sophistication and understanding of food data to help food lovers efficiently and precisely find great recipes,” said Vadim Geshel, CTO of Yummly. “The incorporation of Node.js code into Yummly’s infrastructure, among other open source systems and databases, maximizes both site productivity and search performance.”

About Yummly
Yummly’s mission is to create the ultimate digital kitchen platform. Headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley, Yummly is backed by Physic Ventures, Unilever Corporate Ventures, First Round Capital, Harrison Metal Capital, Intel Capital, and The Harvard Common Press.  Its founding angel investors and advisory board include: Jeff Jordan (partner at Andreessen Horowitz), Bill Cobb (CEO, H&R Block), Justin LaFrance (StumbleUpon), Marcia Hooper and Brad O’Neill (CEO, TechValidate). For more information, visit www.yummly.com.
Connect with Yummly:
Read the Yummly Nibbles & Bits blog: http://www.yummly.com/blog/

Visit us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/yummly
Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/yummly

Yummly is a trademark 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.

Media Contact
Olivia Hine
Bhava Communications for Yummly
yummly@bhavacom.com