Amazon.com sells cookbooks, gourmet foods and -- at least in the Seattle area -- groceries. Now the online retailer is investing in Foodista, a tiny Seattle online recipe site that launched last December.

Amazon.com recently led the startup company's $550,000 financing round, a sign that the online retailing powerhouse may be getting serious about the distribution of recipes. That has implications for a number of Seattle companies in the online recipe space, namely AllRecipes.com, Big Oven and RecipeZaar.

Foodista co-founder Barnaby Dorfman -- who spent seven years at Amazon as a vice president of A9 and a director of IMDb -- confirmed the financing in an interview with TechFlash today.

But Dorfman didn't offer specifics about Amazon.com's specific interests in Foodista, an online encyclopedia of food that also includes thousands of recipes and information about cooking tools.

Best described as a Wikipedia for food, Foodista allows community members to upload recipes, photos and other information. Like Wikipedia, community members also can edit pages about meatballs, zucchini, apple pie or thousands of other foods or recipes. Dorfman said the goal is to eliminate the duplicate entries typically found on other cooking sites -- 40 or 50 similar recipes for paella or halibut or eggs Benedict.

"We haven't completely solved this problem," he said. "Kind of like Wikipedia, if you can imagine if everybody had a version of the history of the Civil War -- writing a separate article  -- it would be pretty useless. We are still finding that line between what is unique and what is repetition." 

Dorfman declined to offer metrics, but he said Foodista has been growing quite nicely since its debut four months ago. (Compete.com shows Foodista at about 17,000 unique visitors for the last month.)

"Just generally, I think that with the recession people are looking to cook at home more than they were before," said Dorfman, who before joining Amazon worked at Marsee Baking in Portland. Other Seattle area recipe sites -- including AllRecipes.com and BigOven -- have noted that trend.

As a result of the investment, Amazon.com's Jorrit Van der Meulen has joined the startup's board.

Dorfman said it made sense to take the investment from Amazon.com, since it has a number of food-related businesses. In addition to cookbooks and Amazon Fresh, it sells an extensive collection of cooking tools.

Foodista had planned to raise the money after the product launch in December, with Dorfman saying that Amazon.com contacted him. He still knows a number of people at the online retailer.

"It was a good fit and we certainly had a history with them," said Dorfman, who talked to other investors as well. "Amazon has a lot of food-related things going on, so we are just excited about the potential to work together on those areas."

Foodista employs three people, with staffers working from the Giraffe Labs space in Pioneer Square. Given the recent decision to close that co-working space, Dorfman said that they plan to move to new offices soon.