Coupons.com acquires recipe aggregator KitchMe

The recipe site lets users create easy meal plans and get coupons for the ingredients

So for all crap we give Honey Boo Boo’s mom (aka Mama June) for her questionable parenting choices, we have to give credit where credit is due: that woman can coupon. And couponing is hard! I tend to eschew coupons altogether because I have an irrational fear of BPA so I’m fairly neurotic about making sure my food doesn’t touch plastic or the inside of a can. But if you’ve ever sat down and tried to plan your meals for the week in conjunction with getting the most out of your coupons—it’s really effing hard and time consuming.

But wait! There’s KitchMe—a recipe and meal-planning site that also gives you coupons for the ingredients. On Thursday, the company was snapped up by Coupons.com for an undisclosed amount. Both co-founders will be joining the Coupons.com team.

While Pinterest has effectively become the world’s go-to treasure trove of recipes, KitchMe takes the discovery angle and adds several features designed to make life easier for busy families. You can browse curated recipes that have been “faved” by other members as you would with Pinterest or other recipe discovery sites, but you can also see which recipes come with coupons for some of the ingredients. And you can also create meal plans for the week by dragging and dropping recipes into your calendar. The ingredients are then automatically added to your shopping list.

All recipes on the site come with a 4.5 star rating or higher, and all can be prepared in under 45 minutes.

The move makes sense for Coupons.com, where food is the most popular category.

"It’s a natural extension for us. When people are thinking about their next trip to the grocery store they are in meal planning mode, so combining meal planning, recipe discovery, shopping list creation and couponing in one place was a no brainer. Once we saw the product we know it was a great fit for us," said Coupons.com COO Brian Weisfeld.

The acquisition comes on the heels of Pinterest’s acquisition of Punchfork, a social discovery site for recipes. Punchfork, which officially shuts down on March 31, aggregates recipes from the top recipe sites on the Web and then uses social data like tweets and Facebook posts to find out which recipes are causing the biggest stir.

More than 10% of all pin boards on Pinterest are categorized under food, making it the fourth most popular category after Home, Arts & Crafts, and Style & Fashion.