Foodista, a wiki for food lovers

Does the world really need another online recipe Web site, especially one based in Seattle? That was on my mind as I sat down with Foodista co-founders Barnaby Dorfman and Sheri Wetherell over coffee this week. After all, Seattle is already home to some of the country's leading food sites, from AllRecipes.com to BigOven to RecipeZaar.

But Dorfman, a food lover who previously served as vice president of Amazon.com's A9 search group, thinks there is better way to discover foods, recipes and cooking techniques online. The idea is to create what amounts to a community-operated online encyclopedia of food and recipes, one that is most closely aligned in spirit with Wikipedia.

Officially launching today, Foodista allows members of the community to edit 2,000 recipes, add comments to those recipes, upload photos of foods and discover various cooking techniques and tools. This all happens on a wiki where content -- including specific ingredients -- can be added or removed. (Who needs eggplant in eggplant Parmesan anyway?)

Dorfman is confident that members of the community will do the right thing, while he also says they have the ability to check the editing history and set locks on certain recipes. But what happens if some joker adds a cup of salt to a favorite chili recipe?

Dorfman admits that it could happen, though he said Wikipedia has proven that the community-driven editing model "does work."

Dorfman and Wetherell moved to Seattle from San Francisco to start the business in April. They brought along co-founder Colin Saunders, a former Amazon.com developer who lived in the basement of the couple's home for a spell as they built the basics of the site. (They have since set up office space at Giraffe Labs in Pioneer Square) The original concept at Foodista was to load as many as one million recipes into the database, but the partners quickly discovered that there was so much repetition that having a massive listing was not very compelling.

As an example Dorfman points out that competitor AllRecipes.com returns more than 300 recipes for apple pie. (Top result is a recipe for apple pie made without apples.) That compares to Foodista, which returns just one result for a basic apple pie recipe.

In order to drive usage, Foodista is working with food bloggers and culinary schools to get them engaged with the site. It plans to offer a widget that food bloggers can embed in their sites (inspired by Urbanspoon's Spoonback program), while the culinary students will be encouraged to upload various foods or recipes not already in the system. It also plans to offer a leaderboard where contributors are classified as "dishwashers," "sous chefs" or other titles, while contributors also can track their specific edits and recipe additions on a personal profile page.

Dorfman said he was also influenced by his work as a director of IMDb, (Correction: Dorfman's title has been changed) the massive online movie database operated by Amazon.  Just as IMDb has become the de facto encyclopedia for movies, Dorfman wants Foodista to become that source for food. Like IMDb, most of the key phrases on Foodista -- say ingredients like basil or tools such as a garlic press -- are linked to more information.

"Nobody has really cracked cooking online," said Dorfman, who before going into the Internet business worked at Marsee Baking in Portland. "This is an open category. This is an unsolved problem. Most of the sites out there essentially are replicating the print model online and that just doesn't work."

Dorfman also is pulling out other plays from his days at Amazon, utilizing Amazon Web Services to power the backend technology and focusing on the customer experience rather than all of the competition. The team used Django to develop the site and built the wiki tools on their own. 

Foodista plans to make money through online advertising, with Dorfman saying he learned from Jeff Bezos to take a "long-term view." Eventually, he sees opportunities with coupons and other special promotions from food companies. It also may consider doing a subscription version of the site, possibly around diets, food allergies or other special needs. Because the company features cooking tools, it also could grab some affiliate revenue by passing leads on to retailers like Amazon.com.

And what about other local players -- including BigOven which operates its own food encyclopedia? Dorfman thinks there's plenty of room to operate, adding that BigOven's encyclopedia is driven by editors while Foodista is open to community edits. Even big players like the Food Network and AllRecipes have what Dorfman believes is a small percentage of the market.