Quick Pitch: Foodily lets users search across multiple sites by ingredient, see recipes that their friends like and create Facebook events around recipes.
Genius Idea: My grandmother's fat box of handwritten recipes is splattered with evidence of family candy-making sessions, holiday meals and her often-shared famous cranberries recipe. My mother has a similar box, which she pulls out before potlucks to search for a friend's casserole recipe.
My recipe box, on the other hand, resides on the Internet.
"Food is inherently social," says Andrea Cutright, the CEO of startup Foodily. That nobody has taken a serious stab at integrating a recipe database with the most prevelant social platform of the day -- Facebook -- seemed like a missed opportunity to Cutright and her co-founder Hillary Mickell.
The two women have created a search engine that pulls in recipes from sites ranging from small food blogs to dominant online recipe publishers like the Food Network. Users can search by ingredients, by excluding specific ingredients, or even by vague terms like "vegan dinner."
Starting Wednesday, they'll also be able to connect their Facebook profiles to the site in order to "like" dishes and view who else in their networks liked the dishes that appear in their search results. They can also create menus, share them with friends and include them in Facebook event pages.
The startup is by no means the first site to combine social interaction and recipes. Allrecipes.com, Cooks.com, BakeSpace.com, and Nibbledish all foster community and encourage comments on recipes, but they do so among strangers. Foodily thinks it can distinguish itself by integrating with users' existing networks.
Foodily's search engine, which launched mid-December, is also a distinguishing factor. Because it indexes every recipe by every ingredient, advertisers know exactly what recipes users are looking at. The startup hopes to use this advantage to sell advertisers an opportunity to distribute coupons to users who are looking at recipes that call for their products.
Index Ventures, at least, sees this is as a viable revenue stream. The firm has contributed $5 million of Series A funding to the idea.
The startup's success now depends heavily on whether home chefs are ready to set aside crowdsourced recipe sites -- and old index-card recipe boxes -- to make Foodily their social recipe resource.
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Image courtesy of iStockphoto, StudioThreeDots