Yummly folds in $6M in funding for recipe searches

Physic Ventures invests in a more tailored way to find the perfect recipes for you

A recipe search site, Yummly, announced Wednesday that it raised its first round of funding. The sweet Series-A addition came from new investor Physic Ventures, with participation from Unilever Corporate Ventures and returning VCs Harrison Metal Capital, First Round Capital, Intel Capital,The Harvard Common Press.

Previously, the two-year-old company raised a $1.85 million seed stage round in late 2010. 

Yummly, a recipe search engine that would make any recipe hoarder and home chef happy, announced Wednesday it has raised $6 million is its first round of funding. The site compiles recipes from several popular recipes sites so you can browse and search for whatever makes your mouth water.

Everyone that has tried to find a delicious creation to concoct in the kitchen has likely been overwhelmed by the responses they get after a quick Web search (how can there be 4.5 million results for authentic thai curry?). This has led Yummly to round up recipes from multiple sources and categorize them for easy searching and reference.

Unlike some general Web searches that just see key words and match them with the most viewed content, Yummly uses a semantic recipe search in conjunction with filters that let you declare is you want something sweet, spicy, salty or savory.

 You can also filter results by dietary restrictions, allergies, nutritional value, price of the meal, or limit the results to sources you trust such as Epicurious or AllRecipes.

I definitely applaud the easy with which users can adjust their searches and get the best results possible, and even the greg nutritional facts included (which is often not part of the decadent recipes people look up).

But hopefully some of the changes coming with the funding will be to brighten up the layout and platform to something a little cheerier and picture focused, since many food lovers love those big glossy pics that show them what the food will absolutely never look like. 

And since the company states that the new funding will go toward hiring and product development, changes and updates to the site are likely.

One other great offering on Yummly is the ability to  quickly reduce or increase the portions so that you don't have do do the calculations incorrect and waste food and ingredients like many of us have in the past. 

The Palo Alto startup handles 4 million unique visitors a month, and has launched a Facebook app to accommodate the 1.4 million Facebook subscribers.

This has helped the company experience a 75% increase in Facebook referral traffic since launching the app last year.  

The online food searching and purchasing market is hotter than some michelin star kitchens, gaining funding and finding new ways to monetize the collective desire to learn and eat haute cuisine.

Just over the holidays, the 13-year-old cooking product website Cooking.com secured another $13.5 million of growth capital financing.

The ecommerce Marina del Ray, Calif.-based Cooking.com, Inc. has received multiple rounds of venture capital funding and now a few rounds of debt equity investment since its 1998 inception -- drawing its funding total close to $100 million dollars.

This latest investment will be used to further the growth of the company’s flagship site www.cooking.com and to accelerate the build-out of the company’s “Powered By Cooking.com” enterprise-level ecommerce solutions, which have powered sites by Starbucks, Pillsbury and Betty Crocker.

And last month, after purchasing the domain Foodie.com nearly nine months ago for $100,000, Glam Media finally launched a social food site called Foodie.

Glam Media is known for launching sites that curate original content as well as advertise to a specific subject of interest but Foodie appears to have a different focus -- creating a platform and meeting place for all those foodies out there. 

This change may have been inspired by the purchase it made back in September of a social media startup called Ning.

While this doesn't mean that Foodie won't also include hand-picked food content and ad curation, but it will mostly provide resources for food lovers to search, share and discuss there most delicious passions.

Foodie is launching with over a hundred food writers, 10 culinary ambassadors (five food critics and five chefs), and 1,000 new recipes on Thursday.