Quick Pitch: GoJee curates recipes from blogs and makes them searchable by ingredient.
Genius Idea: Beautiful photos and a personal touch.
Allrecipes.com has about 5,000 recipes for cookies. Gojee has just about twice that many recipes total. And you can't search for "cookies."
What you can search for using GoJee is "chocolate," "caramel" or "butter."
"One thing that makes us different from all of the other recipe sites is that they serve up every solution," says Gojee CEO and co-founder Michael Lavalle. "We've found that a lot of people buy the same 20 ingredients and they make the same 20 dishes with them, and they've been doing that for five years. We're not going to convert a chicken eater into a beef eater, but what we can do is give that chicken eater some really fun stuff to make that he hasn't really thought about before."
The site taps into the collection of personalized recipes that bloggers make available online -- if you can find them. Every recipe on the site was handpicked by GoJee's staff, and the startup asked 71 different bloggers to supply the page-sized food photos that distinguish the site's look.
Users search for what they're craving. They can influence results by what they have in their pantries (in some cases they can set up their loyalty grocery cards to automatically update this) and what they dislike. Where other food search engines like Foodily aptly strive to give you what you've asked for, GoJee's goal is to introduce you to something you hadn't thought about.
Since it launched last week, 50,000 users have signed up for GoJee. Lavalle says one of its biggest draws is that the site, which displays search results as giant photo slideshows instead of tiny listings, is simply so darn beautiful.
"It's so fun to use and it's so pleasing as an experience," he says. "Whether or not you like food or hate food or whatever, it's just a happy hour of your day. "
To read recipes, users need to visit its creator's website, which Lavalle says keeps bloggers happy, too.
Before launching GoJee, Lavalle and his co-founders spent about a year in the food space. First they worked on a project he describes as "Mint.com for food." Next they moved on to "Twitter for food."
Now, in what amounts to something like StumbleUpon for food, it looks like they've finally landed on food's ideal online format.
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
