Panna is a digital cooking magazine for iPhone and iPad that features high-definition video lessons led by highly acclaimed chefs like Rick Bayless, Jonathan Waxman, and Anita Lo. An issue is released every months and contains 13 seasonal video recipes from the participating chefs. The emphasis is on home-cooking, so each chef guides the user step-by-step through their favorite recipes in a home kitchen environment.

“It’s inspiring to help anyone create amazing food for someone they care about, and that matters,” said founder David Ellner in an email. “People are always looking for inspiration around recipes to find new ways to impress the people they’re cooking for. Panna uses the best chefs to provide this inspiration. I’m trying to transform the way people follow recipes and give people recipes that are guaranteed to be delicious. I want people to cook more and build their confidence around cooking.”

The app includes highly visual, drool-worthy photography of lacquered chicken, lasagna, and caramelized cauliflower, to name a few. The content is highly curated, and the chefs not only provide basic instructions, but also little tips and tricks and suggestions, like how to cook for company or making the perfect biscuit, and shopping lists. Ellner said that Panna bridges the gap between traditional cookbooks and sites like YouTube which are not curated and often have lower production quality. It was named one of the best apps of 2012 by Apple and chosen as an Editor’s Choice in the app store.

The popularity of shows like Top Chef and the expansion of the foodie movement has led to increased interest in cooking tasty, high-quality food at home. Whether it is for a dinner party or a casual Sunday supper, people are excited about whipping up restaurant-quality food in their own kitchens. Panna caters to this crowd and provides chefs wider opportunities to engage with an audience. The first download is free and after that, individual issues are $4.99 with a year’s subscription for $14.99. Content never expires and each issue also contains one free recipe.

Ellner said that his biggest challenge with Panna is getting people to pay for content in an area where so much content is free. However, since the target audience is people who are passionate about food and the product is “worth it,” this should not be an obstacle to continued growth. Before founding Panna, Ellner spent 25 years as an executive in the media industry and brought his experience with video content and digital technology to make Panna as beautiful and seamless as possible.

Anthem Ventures led this round, with participation from Lerer Ventures, Crosslink Ventures, Maveron, Advancit Capital, RSL Venture artiness, Launchpad LA, David Tisch’s BoxGroup and angels. Panna is based in Hoboken, New Jersey. The company previously raised $435,000 and partnered with  brands like Sur La Table and Whole Foods to include new chef segments on cooking equipment and vegan friendly meals.

This round will be used to expand the team, produce new content, and accelerate marketing and sales efforts. Panna is currently expanding to Android, and the June issue will feature live fire Mexican grilling recipes.

Check out this video from Jonathan Waxman (pictured above) about how to make a perfect apple tart.

Photo Credit: Panna

Fork the Cookbook has launched a “Github for Recipes.” It draws inspiration from the open source community, as home chefs “fork” recipes and then track changes and tweaks.

Every home chef makes recipe modifications. Sometimes, certain ingredients are not available and dishes are adapted to personal dietary restrictions and taste. Sometimes while in the kitchen, a cook discovers that a splash of vanilla makes a huge flavor difference or realizes that salting zucchini strips is an important prep step. Fork the Cookbook documents the evolution of recipes because cooking, like programming, is a dynamic process.

“There is no one true recipe,” said The Forking Chef, the teams’ public-facing alias. “We’ve always been told to learn from our mistakes. Fork the Cookbook accelerates the mistake process by letting others work with you on your recipes so you maximize the amount you learn while minimizing the costs for you to learn it. As the saying goes, wise men learn from others’ mistakes, fools learn from their own.”

The founders have been active in software development since the 1990s and regularly contribute to open source software projects. They are also avid home cooks. After years spent modifying recipes, digging through the comments section on food blogs for tips, or reading recipe reviews, they decided to build a product to put the changes front-and-center.

You enter your recipes into the site to create a personal cookbook. Other community members can contribute to that project and the recipes are presented with big, bold pictures on the homepage and include such delectable sounding dishes as “Asian meatballs with sesame lime dipping sauce” and “Nutella Rocky Road Bars.”

The Internet has no shortage of recipe-sharing or regimen-specific sites. A simple search yields millions of ways to prepare Brussels sprouts and 100 ways to bake Paleo-friendly cheesecake. However, most of the sites are focus on the inspiration stage rather than the editing. The recipes sit there stagnantly while the home chef, decked out in an apron and wielding a knife, goes rogue. In a world where everyone is on some sort of nutrition regimen, simplifying the modification process is a persistent need.

“Whether you’re allergy-prone and an accidental bite of a peanut can send you to the ER or you are constantly peeing on sticks to check if you’re in ketosis, unlike the years gone by, there’s something for everyone these days,” said The Forking Chef in a blog post. “This is the peak of innovation for the gluten free, Paleo advocates, Dukan dieters, Weight Watchers, low carbers because like never before, there is a site for each and every one of us to put our heads together and re-invent grandma’s favorites into something that suits us.”

Sites like CucumberTown, Forkinit, and BigOven offer comparable services, but Fork the Cookbook is distinguishable by its commitment to user-experience and interface. It has no news feeds, up/down votes, or likes. The Forking Chef is adamant about focusing on the recipes rather than social features and design that does the recipes justice. The team of five is based in Sydney, Australia.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

There are plenty of recipe discovery apps and websites, but Edamam is hoping to stand out with its focus on helping you eat better. Now the Edamam experience is even better with the launch of a new iPad app.

The company debuted at the DEMO conference in April with the goal of “organizing the world’s food knowledge.” With its free apps, also available on the iPhone and Android devices, Edamam makes it easy to find intriguing healthy recipes that just about anyone can make.

“We originally wanted to target foodies, but we discovered that the people actually using Edamam were moms,” said founder and chief executive Victor Penev in an interview with VentureBeat. “The Pinterest demographic of 30 to 45 year old women makes up most of our users because it saves them time.”

While Edamam is helpful on smartphones when shopping for ingredients, when it comes to actually cooking tablets are far superior, Penev pointed out. The Edamam iPad app, just like the app for 7-inch Android tablets, is graphically rich and plenty fast.

It doesn’t take much to get started with Edamam: You’re greeted with a massive search interface upon opening the app, but there are also helpful recommendations at the bottom of the screen. The app searches recipes from several sites based on their nutritional information. You can also easily share recipes from within the Edamam app. Within a few minutes of browsing the iPad app, I was able to find several recipes that I wanted to try.

Eventually, Penev says the company will include the ability to take notes and photos within the app. The goal,  of course, is to make Edamam your go-to recipe finder and cooking tool.

Edamam is based in New York City and is currently raising an angel round.

Top photo via Shutterstock

Hello Fresh is taking a Web 2.0 approach to Julia Child’s mission. This food startup has raised $10 million to expand its platform, which makes creating tasty, healthy meals at home as effortless as possible.

Each week, the site lets home cooks peruse five new recipes created by professional chefs and nutritionists. The recipes take 30 minutes or less to prepare, only require basic kitchen equipment, and come with step-by-step instructions. The featured recipes for this week included warm sweet potato salad with pan fried tilapia, duck a l’orange salad, and herb garlic beef with watercress, peanuts, and baby carrots. I’d say that sounds significantly tastier than ramen.

The next step is to select the meals you’d like to prepare. Hello Fresh operates a “soft subscription” service, which means users choose how many meals they would like a week and for how many people. Next is the real kicker: One of Hello Fresh’s people on the ground will serve as a “personal sous-chef” by grocery shopping for you and delivering a box to your door with all the recipes and ingredients measured out. The rest, what is left of it, is up to you.

The company was founded in Berlin and currently operates in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, France, Australia, and the US. Since beginning in 2011, it has grown to more than 100 employees and recently delivered the millionth meal in Germany. This $10 million in growth financing will bring Hello Fresh into new markets. It was led by Vowerk Ventures, a firm based in Germany, with all the old investors — Rocket Internet, Holtzbrink Ventures, and Kinnevik AB — throwing in as well.

Food startups are growing in popularity with consumers and venture capitalists alike as Internet entrepreneurs find innovative ways to help people eat better. Farmigo is an online farmer’s market that also announced a significant investment round this morning. Recipe sharing network Foodily is backed by $5 million in venture capital, and chef-prepared meal delivery service Munchery closed $4 million for expansion last month. There is also LA startup Pop-Up Pantry, which distributes frozen, vacuum-sealed gourmet meals, and world food subscription service Hungry Globetrotter. Not to mention services like Seamless and GrubHub which tackle restaurants deliveries.

Eating is something people have to do every single day. There is an ever-present need for ways to eat tasty, healthy food in a cost-effective and convenient manner. Food, unlike various other consumer products, will never go out of style.

You already spends hours talking about food with your friends, and Foodily has come up with a better way to do it online. This food-lover’s startup is launching its newest version just a week before Thanksgiving to make the meal planning process as social and as seamless as possible. 

At its core, Foodily is a recipe sharing network. The platform features hundreds of recipes from around the web that users can search, collect, and share on their smartphones. Unlike Foodspotting, Pinterest, Evernote, or Springpad, which enable collecting and sharing, Foodily is built on the premise that creating meals is innately a social action and friends should be able to have a meaningful dialogue surrounding the dishes they make.

The app is designed to make conversation as natural as possible. It has group chat capabilities for questions, answers, and collaboration. Looking for inspiration on kid-friendly dinners? Invite all the parents in your Foodily network to make suggestions. Attempting to organize a 15-person Thanksgiving potluck feast? Coordinate by asking everyone to share their ideas and comments accordingly. Clueless on how to use those kiwis you received in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) box? Pose the query to your whole network.

You can even receive direct advice from professional chefs and food bloggers who are on the Foodily platform, including major culinary names like Wolfgang Puck, Cat Cora, ‘Cake Boss’ Buddy Valastro, and celebrity chef Lulu Powers.

Founder Andrea Cutright founded Foodily after a career at Yahoo. While there is certainly no shortage of food content online, she saw a lack of meaningful ways to talk about it.

“Food is one of the most social things we do. People talk about it all the time, and I wondered why there wasn’t a service that connects food you care about with the people you care about,” she said during an interview at the VentureBeat offices. “Food plays such an important role in our lives. We want to help people make great decisions about food, and giving food its proper social presence will lead to better decision making.”

Users collect recipes from around the web, and Foodily’s engine indexes the data to make searchable. People can also follow their friends and tastemakers and check out a “recipe” feed from people in their food world. The design is highly visual, and every dish is tagged with dietary restrictions, like low-fat, gluten-free, vegetarian, and dairy-free.

“We eat with our eyes first, and even people who aren’t food bloggers want to share their efforts, Cutright said. “Food is a center of creativity, it is the affordable luxury and a way to make yourself feel good, as well as connect with other people. Breaking bread with people is an interesting way to get to know them, and we bring this real life experience online.”

The Foodily engine is processing all this nutritional and social data in the background, and Cutright sees the data component as a possibility for monetization. People spend so much money on food, and the recipes they engage with are an expression of personal preferences. Ultimately, Foodily could recommend recipes and products and work with food producers to present offers.

The team of eight is based in San Francisco. The company was founded in 2011 and last year took $5 million in investment from Index Ventures.

Peace Corps Volunteers and entrepreneurs have a lot in common. To be successful, both must be idealistic, motivated, adventurous, resourceful, and adaptable. Both groups pinpoint needs and endeavor to address them, and both are no strangers to bad food.

Vijay Rajendran served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cameroon from 2002 to 2004. Now a decade later, he has formed a startup called Hungry Globetrotter that gives people the opportunity to create authentic, delicious, ethnic meals in their own homes.

Hungry Globetrotter is a subscription service for food items that highlights an international destination every month. Users receive boxes designed around specific cuisines, with boutique ingredients that can be used to prepare home-cooked dinners. The packages come with recipes for a well-rounded meal, as well as a regional guide the tells the story behind the area and the products.

The first subscription box was called the South Indian Sampler. It contained a bottle of curry sauce and organic spices, among other things, that could be turned into a feast of madras curry, garam masala rice with vegetables and yogurt raita. Users must buy their own perishable items. October’s theme was Argentina, and included Gaucho Ranch Chimichurri sauce, balsamic pecan vinegar, paprika finishing salt, and gourmet quinoa. 

“I am someone who has lived my life pursuing good food everywhere,” Rajendran said. “I want to  introduce people to new brands, cuisines, flavors and cultures that they can experience through food. Culinary tourism is something people may only do a few times in their life and I want to empower them to have these experiences at home.”

After a youth spent living abroad, a stint as a venture capital consultant in New York, and a Peace Corps Volunteer specializing in micro finance in West Africa, Rajendran is trying to combat the standardization he sees in the American food industry. Most mainstream grocery stores are saturated with mediocre international options, while world food stores are few and far between outside of metropolitan areas,an can be overwhelming and expensive.

Another issue is a lack of knowledge. A home cook may want to create a Moroccan repast, but have no idea what ingredients to buy. The process of researching, purchasing, and preparing is time-consuming for a casual dinner in, and amateurs may be deterred from experimenting with cuisines they know nothing about. Rajendran said Hungry Globetrotter’s vision is about more than just foreign flavors. By encouraging people to roll up their sleeves and cook, it creates a global context and communal experience surrounding the food.

“When I was in Cameroon, I was thrown into a culture and a cuisine that I knew nothing about,” he said. “I became a part of the community through the people I connected with over meals. We would eat together and I would learn about traditions, rituals, festivals, agriculture, family life and so forth. Food became a medium for me to gather, socialize, and share. It gave me a way to genuinely explore their history and grasp a broader sense of culture.”

To this end, Hungry Globetrotter emphasizes content in addition to product. There is a smörgåsbord of food subsciprition services in the e-commerce space, such as Foodzie, Love With Food, Culture Kitchen, Global Grub, and GrubKit. Many of these sell international snacks and artisanal samples, or cater to niche markets. They are not geared towards full meal preparation which can potentially have an impact beyond exposure to new tastes.

“In American food culture, there is the over-communization of certain foods, people often don’t prepare foods at home, and obesity as an epidemic is troubling” he said. “There are studies that show that children who eat dinner at home eat more fruits and vegetables. We are not trying to be a health food company, but we know that something positive starts when people cook at home, and when that process is not a chore, but rather something exciting. The experience of preparing and enjoying home-cooked meals can address many elements of the food system that are broken today.

Hungry Globetrotter sent out its first box in September and is based in San Francisco. The November box will focus on Morocco and December will have a Japanese izakaya theme.

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‘Frozen’ is an adjective that doesn’t compute within the lexicon of gourmet cuisine. But for entrepreneurs David Hauslaib and Tom Balamaci, the founders of Pop-Up Pantry, ‘frozen’ is at the core of their service, which delivers epicurean-style meals directly to customers’ homes.

Launched in July, 2011, Pop-Up Pantry is a Los Angeles-based startup dedicated to providing the American consumer with access to gourmet meals, hitherto limited to restaurants helmed by the likes of Emeril Lagasse, Wolfgang Puck, and Mario Batali.

Now, with the aid of Pop-Up Pantry, food lovers anywhere in the U.S. can log onto the company’s website and order three-course meals prepared by world-class chefs at an affordable price-point (meals start at $17 per person).

After preparation, Hauslaib says the meals are frozen, vacuum-sealed, placed in an insulated box and delivered to customers via UPS or FedEx. Once the meals reach their destinations, clients only have to follow the simple re-heating instructions to enjoy a five-star meal with an undiminished flavor profile, according to the founder. He told VentureBeat the reheating process takes no longer than 30 minutes.

Hauslaib added, “We are one of the only food delivery companies in the country that can deliver food to you even if you don’t live in a major city.” He added that food lovers living outside of major-metro areas are “underserved.”

Source: Pop-Up Pantry

One of Pop-Up Pantry’s tasty-looking frozen meals

For example, Hauslaib said, if you “live in Kentucky or 45 minutes outside of Phoenix, unless you’re going to make the drive into the city, you’re looking at Applebees or Outback, or you’re ordering Domino’s, those are your food choices.”

Hauslaib identified the evolving television landscape as one of the factors that helped bring Pop-Up Pantry to fruition.

“You’ve got about 25 million American women in major cities, but also women living in food deserts, who really, in the last five years, have been exposed to this explosion in food culture: reality cooking shows, Food Network, the new launch of the Cooking Channel. The only magazine category seeing an increase in subscriptions is food,” Hauslaib said.

“Tom and I say, ‘you know, we couldn’t have started this company five years ago.’ There was not an education about food that really penetrated the homes of almost every American.”

The rise of food culture, the fact that recession-hit Americans are dining out less, and Pop-Up Pantry’s expected profit margins in the 30-40 percent range, convinced investors from GRP Partners, CrossCut Ventures, and Launchpad LA to collectively give the pre-prepared-meal delivery service $1.71 million in seed funding.

“What we do have is more impressive margins than anything else in the food industry,” Hauslaib said.

Additionally, that preliminary seed round included angel investments from Lebanese wheat baron Michel Daher, Crosscut CEO Adam Goldenberg, and “How I Met Your Mother” star Neil Patrick Harris, said the Pop-Up Pantry founder.

Harris, who posts often on his NPH Food Porn Twitter account, became involved with Pop-Up Pantry through his partner, David Burtka, a Mario Batali- protégé, who has submitted a dozen menu ideas to Pop-Up Pantry, said Hauslaib.

Most recently, the Pop-Up Pantry team partnered with television series MasterChef to provide customers with the winning dishes from the show’s season finale, which aired September 10. Contestant Christine Ha won the MasterChef competition with her crab vegetable salad appetizer, braised pork belly entree, and a coconut lime sorbet for dessert. Also, MasterChef enthusiasts now have the option of ordering three-course dinners inspired by Ha’s and finalist Josh Mark’s celebrated recipes on Pop-Up Pantry’s website.

“It’s taking the food you see on television, the reason you get excited about cuisine, and what you can taste and what kind of ingredients you want to pick up at the grocery store, and being able to deliver it to your door,” said Hauslaib.

“That’s the gap we wanted to solve with Pop-Up Pantry.”

Top photo: Pop-Up Pantry founders Tom Balamaci (left) and David Hauslaib. Credit: Pop-Up Pantry

Finding recipes online is not at all hard: There are hundreds of thousands of blogs and websites devoted to making delicious food. But Yummly its trying to round up tons of recipes and make them easily searchable so users don’t have to wade through all those websites.

“Our vision is to make Yummly one hub to find recipes and cook meals,” said Yummly co-founder and chief executive David Feller in an interview with VentureBeat, “We want to improve the [recipe] finding experience and have built a data platform that understands food.”

What makes Yummly stand out is its semantic recipe search, which understands the context of what people are searching for instead of focusing only on the exact keywords. It also makes good use of multiple search filters to hone your searches. Most prominently are the taste filters (shown right) — sliding bars that let you chose which tastes you prefer such as sweet, spicy, or savory —  which narrow down recipes that fit your taste bud preferences. You can also filter by dietary restrictions, allergies, nutritional value, cuisines, type of meal, price of the meal, and which source the recipe comes from, such as Epicurious or AllRecipes.

“We feel semantic search is incredibly important. For example, if you searched for a fish recipe in Google, it might not understand to include results for salmon, like Yummly would,” said Feller, “Yummly doesn’t need to have the specific keyword to find what you’re looking for, it understands the context of what you’re searching.”

The interface leaves something to be desired; it’s simple, but bland. Though compared to one of its competitor’s, Cooks.com, the website is much easier to read and digest. One plus for Yummly is that it provides nutritional information for every recipe in the same format you’ve see on a food package, so you know where to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Yummly’s search engine draws is recipes from 15 food blogs and websites to make up its recipe results, hoping to save people the time they spend Googling a recipe and clicking through to multiple websites.

However, the company does face some competition from Google’s search engine, which is most people’s go-to place for finding information. Google’s plans for its own version of semantic search could make the search engine more intelligent and powerful and make Yummly redundant.

Yummly attracted funding from Physic Ventures, which led the round. Physic Ventures partner Andy Donner told VentureBeat that his firm was drawn to Yummly because of its semantic search process.

“We were compelled by the natural language scientists who really understood how to take unstructured data and make sense of it, said Donner, “Yummly is able to create meaning from recipes by parsing the data and wow users with highly accurate searches.”

Unilever Corporate Ventures, Harrison Metal Capital, First Round Capital, Intel Capital, The Harvard Common Press, and private angel investors also participated in the funding round. Yummly was founded in 2010 and is based in Palo Alto, Calif. The company has raised $7.85 million in total funding.

Strawberry and chocolate cake image via Shutterstock

After months of silence, Glam Media finally revealed its plans for the company’s next big site launch, Foodie.

VentureBeat broke the news that Glam purchased the Foodie.com domain for $100,000 back in June 2011. At the time, we theorized that the company was planning some sort of gender-neutral food/cooking vertical, despite already having food sections on both Glam.com and Brash.com, Glam’s male-focused site.

“We were completely unprepared to talk about Foodie when VentureBeat published the news (this past summer), but now after two years of work understanding how social media has affected consumer behavior for interests in restaurants, recipes, and chefs, we’re launching Foodie,” said Glam Media CEO Samir Arora in an interview with VentureBeat.

Traditionally, Glam Media’s strategy for launching new sites involves intelligent curation of both original content and advertising that’s geared toward a specific subject or genre. However, Foodie marks a significant change to that strategy. The new site will serve as a full-fledged social network about food and will take advantage of Glam’s purchase of social media startup Ning in September. And while Foodie will also feature content and ad curation, Arora said eventually the site will brand out to offer web app products and resources for food lovers, much in the same way Google was able to build its web services adjacent to its main search engine product.

Foodie launches with over a hundred premium food writers, a panel of culinary ambassadors (five high-profile food critics and five top chefs), 1,000 new recipes, and a handful of branded content campaigns from brands like Betty Crocker and Dannon Yogurt’s Activia. Foodie’s culinary ambassadors will help nominate the world’s top restaurants and provide regional guides that will be produced annually. The site is also rolling out a social ranking system to identify quality contributions to the site.

“Most social sites launch without any game plan for generating revenue and most of them end up failing,” Arora said, adding that there have been obvious exceptions to that like Twitter and Facebook. Foodie, on the other hand, intends to monetize itself upon launching. Arora said the site will initially reach 10 million consumers per month, and that food could eventually become Glam Media’s biggest category of concentration.

It’ll be interesting to see if Foodie can leverage its mix of content and ad curation to jump-start the social aspects of the site, and ultimately compel people to continue coming back whenever they start planning dinner.

Check out some screenshots of the new site below.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company makes the task of finding recipes simpler and more personal. David Feller, co-founder and chief executive of Yummly, said the company will use the money to expand its services. He said the company employs a cornucopia of algorithms to help it understand more than 15,000 food ingredients on a variety of levels (from nutritional value to taste). It combines that with knowledge of your own taste. The result is a more sophisticated food search tool with personalized taste in finding recipes. The site, started in 2009, has more than 500,000 recipes.

The seed round of funding came from First Round Capital, Harrison Metal Capital, Intel Capital and angels. Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal Capital and angel investor Marcia Hooper will join the company’s board.

With its focus on doing search for one particular thing, Yummly resembles other successful sites such as Pandora Radio (songs) and Netflix (movies). The site can filter recipe searches by ingredients, allergens, price, prep time, nutrition, holidays and meal courses, diet restrictions, food for vegans and other categories. Users can publish their own recipes and make custom meal plans. You can also make friends with other cooking fans via the company’s own TasteBuds network or Facebook.