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

Chewse recently presented at the 500 Startups Demo Day in Mountain View and today announced the close of a $1 million round of seed funding. So far, Chewse is only active in LA but this financing will facilitate geographical (and waistband) expansion.

On Chewse’s marketplace, professionals enter their search parameters and the engine will yield relevant results. There are basic filters, including zip code, delivery time and date, number of guests, and budget, but the listings can also be narrowed by specific types of cuisine, dietary restrictions, and serving style. Orders can be made and paid for online, and Chewse will ensure onetime delivery.

Chewse solves 2 problems that office admins across the country face,” said founder Tracy Lawrence in an email.

“First, the discovery of meals that will accomodate various dietary restrictions and cuisine preferences of people in a group. Second is the actual ordering of meals. With over 95% of the catering market transacted offline with phones and faxes, we’re creating a simplified way to order that can be done swiftly and with a few clicks. We are using technology, not manpower, to route orders and make recommendations.”

Lawrence spent years in the hospitality industry and experienced first hand how difficult and expensive it was for office administrators and event planners to order food for big groups. She wanted to connect organizations with restaurants that offer tasty, quality food, rather than simply aggregating every restaurant that has a catering option. Furthermore Chewse makes it simple to order new and interesting meals, rather than sandwiches every time.

Chewse is has already fed more than 20,000 meals to big customers, including Wells Fargo, the University of Southern California, and PriceWaterHouseCoopers. Lawrence said these corporations are willing to spend tens-of-thousands dollars a year on Chewse, and the waiting list is more than 700 companies long.

Chewse has not yet revealed their next market. The company recently relocated their headquarters from L.A. to San Francisco, but the presence of startups like ZeroCater that offers similar services means Lawrence considering other options. Chris Sacca, Telegraph Hill, InnoSpring, Benjamin Ling, Richard Chen, Russell Cook, and 500 Startups invested in this round.

Photo credit: Bods/Flickr

Something came over me after I read about Doritos’ newest snack “food,” Doritos Locos Taco Doritos. Suddenly I had to have a Taco Bell Doritos Locos taco. No — that wasn’t good enough. Like Doritos, I had to take a Doritos Locos taco and make it better.

Innovation is the heart of Silicon Valley, after all. Egged on by copy editor Jason Wilson, whose personal beliefs endorse all invention as holy, I went for it.

So today, for lunch, I placed an online order for a Mission grilled cheese sandwich at The Melt (whose online ordering system rocks, by the way). Then I walked down to Taco Bell, ordered a pair of Tacos Locos, and then took them over to The Melt. I picked up my grilled cheese (pepper jack on sourdough) and took it back to the office.

And then I merged the two: I opened up the Mission, placed one Taco Loco inside, and replaced the grilled, cheesy lid. Voilá: The Locomission was born.

Verdict: It’s not bad. The flavor of the two foods, despite coming from almost diametrically opposite ends of the foodie spectrum, complement one another quite well. The semicircular taco shape is almost perfectly fitted to the semicircular shape of one half of a grilled cheese made with sourdough — as if they were made for one another. Taco Bell’s spiced ground meat is an excellent addition to the Melt’s spicy cheese. The nacho cheese-flavored Doritos shell was a delicious complement to the Melt’s sourdough. And there was even some lettuce and salsa inside the taco to offset the guilt of eating all that grease and meat.

As a bonus, this makes the sandwich quite filling. If I have one complaint about The Melt, it’s that one sandwich is never enough to satisfy me for lunch. But a sandwich plus a Taco Loco — now you’re talking. In fact, while I got two Locos Tacos, and only one fits on each half of a grilled cheese sandwich, I decided to skip the second taco and just eat the rest of the grilled cheese by itself.

The only real downside is that the Doritos Locos’ shell was rather soggy. I don’t think that’s the fault of the grilled cheese, as the shell was already a bit soggy when I took it out of its wrapper. Maybe I waited too long to consume it after ordering from Taco Bell. Next time I might pick up the sandwich at the Melt first.

The Locomission

$4.75 at The Melt + $2.78 (two tacos) at Taco Bell = $7.53

860 calories (for both tacos plus a whole sandwich)

Photo credit: Jason Wilson/VentureBeat

Chefs Feed launched in four new cities today, bringing its curated selection of chef-recommended dishes to Las Vegas, San Diego, Denver, and Boulder. The app is now available in 19 cities in America as well as London, and it features curated content from over 600 elite chefs. But the founders are not just interested in geographical growth; they are setting out to build a media empire.

“Everything we do, we do with the chefs in mind,” said founder and CEO Steve Rivera, in an interview at VentureBeat’s office. “Before they were just the guys with big white coats back in the kitchen, now they have this celebrity status. Their brands are bigger than they are. We are capitalizing on where the food scene is and creating dialogue, to help chefs keep the lights on in their restauranteurs and monetize on their fame.”

Chefs create profiles with a selection of their favorite dishes at other restaurants with the app. The content provides a glimpse into what the best chefs like to eat and serves for a guide for diners who want to track down the most delicious dishes. It’s an excellent way for locals to discover hidden gems as well as for travelers to quickly figure out where they’d like to eat in a new place.

“People are getting frustrated with user-generated content,” said founder and CMO Jared Rivera. “They want to get straight to the point. Anyone who cares what they are putting in their body and doesn’t want to sledge through a bunch of noise to find out whats good, goes right to the experts. A meal is a terrible thing to waste and you don’t want to screw around with good food.”

I have tested out Chefs Feed in San Francisco and on a recent trip to Seattle. For me, the content provides an exciting glimpse into the worlds of chefs I have read about and admired. Users scroll through the images on chefs profiles, and can click on specific items and chefs to learn more. You can also follow your favorite chefs and click on “Ate it” or “Plan it” buttons for dishes you have or want to try. A feed surfaces content as chefs add it, and the “Feed Me Now” feature will pull up a map of tasty options in your area.

It is Chefs Feed I have to thank for guiding me to Zuni’s roasted chicken for two. I am still drooling.

Diners benefit from help with where to eat and what to order. Chefs, on the other hand, view Chefs Feed as a platform to engage with their fans and patrons when they are outside of the kitchen.

“A lot of chefs realize they should use social networking and technology, but you forget to do it or time becomes an issue,” said chef Mark Dommen of One Market Restaurant in San Francisco. “This is a great way to connect with customers when are are unable to get out in the dining room. There are so many restaurants out there, to be able to connect with anyone is really helpful. I like the fact that the audience all are people who are into food.

Founders Steve and Jared Rivera are brothers who ran a successful restaurant PR company that Wagstaff Worldwide acquired last year. They had been working on Chefs Feed as a side project and decided to turn it into a full-fledged business. Jared then embarked on cross-country journey, sponsored by Virgin, where he became the “chef whisperer” and ate at over 500 restaurants in eight months. Twelve cities (and a few extra pounds) later, they launched the first version of the product.

Chefs Feed 2.0 came out last October with added social features that pulls in social graphs and helps you communicate more directly with chefs as well as make OpenTable reservations. Now, their vision is even bigger. Continued national expansion is on the way, but the Riveras have plans to add in more marketing tools for chefs, syndicate the content, explore e-commerce, build a unique lead generation system, and take transactional costs for referrals.

In the meantime, I will continue to lust over images of roasted meats, seasonal salads, and decadent desserts.

Photo credit: Chefs Feed

This morning OpenTable announced that it’s bought food photo app Foodspotting for $10 million.

Launched in 2009, Foodspotting helps you discover new dishes by looking at pictures of what other people have eaten. It sounds simple, but it’s a model that helped Foodspotting raise $3.75 million in a pair of funding rounds.

Fortunately for Foodspotting fans, the OpenTable deal doesn’t mean that the Foodspotting app is disappearing. Instead, you can expect much more robust integration between the two apps over the next few months.

This is especially true for OpenTable, which will get a major visual upgrade from its new Foodspotting content. “By adding more visually compelling content to help people decide where to dine and discover dishes they’ll love, we hope to make it even easier to find the perfect table for any occasion,” OpenTable CEO Matt Roberts said in a statement.

Foodspotting has actually been working with OpenTable since last May, when its users started making reservations through the app.

Alongside the deal, Foodspotting CEO Alex Andrezejewski is joining OpenTable as a lead user interface designer.

To make that possible Evernote is serving up a brand new version of Evernote Food, an app for iPhone and iPad. Just as bakers do when their cake is missing that je ne sais quoi of deliciousness, Evernote started again from scratch.

Evernote Food launched in December of last year to capture memorable moments around food. Users could create Meals and add photos, captions, location tags, and notes to document their dining adventures. Evernote is a wildly popular digital notebook that can be used to save ideas, liked things, lists, and images and even to organize work projects.

The company recently raised a whopper of an $85 million round of funding. During an interview with VentureBeat, chief executive Phil Libin stated his intention was to focus on product and the app’s mobile platforms to keep its 45 million users excited and engaged.

With Evernote Food 2.0, foodies of all persuasions will be able to capture every stage of epicurean pleasure, from the initial inspiration through the preparation process, up to the “grande finale” of the meal. The design takes into consideration that meals often start “hours, days, even weeks before you take the first bite.” Now upon opening the app, users can choose from four options: Explore Recipes, My Cookbook, Restaurants, and My Meals.

The recipes function is a search tool with content from popular blogs and websites. Users can casually peruse recipes or search the database by dish, ingredients, or source. They can then store recipes in My Cookbook.

For those looking to eat out, Evernote Food 2.0 has a restaurant discovery feature. Diners can search by location or type of cuisine and can access relevant information about each location. Places can be saved in a to-do list or logged as a place already visited.

Once you have created a beautiful home repast or stuffed yourself at a restaurant of your choosing, the My Meals feature lets you preserve those memories in true Evernote form.

There are hundreds of food apps out there for finding and sharing recipes and just as many ways to document food experiences. Many of these products are great in one particular area but don’t offer options for the entire spectrum of eating.

As the team stated it in a blog post, this single app can work for “everything from cooking your grandma’s recipe to planning a dining tour of Tokyo.”

Evernote was founded in 2009 and is based in Redwood City, Calif.

Check out this video exploration of Evernote Food 2.0:

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Genetics startup 23andMe raises $50M from Yuri Milner & others, drops price to $99

Genetic testing startup 23andMe has raised $50 million in fresh funding with hopes to increase its user base and make greater genetic discoveries, the company announced today. 23andMe, based in Mountain View, Calif., tests people’s genes and gives them data about their ancestry and genealogy based on those tests. The company says the new investment will go toward boosting its user base of 180,000 customers to one million people. The new round was raised by new investor Yuri Milner, a powerful Russian billionaire, and existing investors Wojcicki, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, New Enterprise Associates, Google Ventures, and MPM Capital. Including the new funding, 23andMe has raised about $102 million in capital to date. Read more on VentureBeat.

One Kings Lane grabs $50M from IVP & others to boost home-focused ecommerce

One Kings Lane, a prominent e-commerce business for home decor, raised $50 million in a new round of funding with hopes of rapid expansion, the company announced today. One Kings Lane sells a variety of home goods to its more than 6 million members. The company launches up to 3,000 new products a day that tie to various decorating themes. The new round of funding was led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), with participation by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), Greylock Partners, Tiger Global Management, and new investor Scripps Networks Interactive. Including the new round, One Kings Lane has raised a total of $117 million. Read more on VentureBeat.

GlassPoint raises $26M to help oil companies make the best of what they’ve got 

There is money in oil, even when it is for technology that makes extracting it more cost-effective. GlassPoint Solar, a company which manufactures solar steam generators for the oil and gas industry, has closed a $26 million round of funding. GlassPoint’s technology is designed to operate in harsh oilfield environments to maximize production. It uses thermal energy to save natural gas resources, reduce gas consumption, and reduce carbon emissions. This investment is “a key next step to future large-scale deployment” of the technology. New investor Royal Dutch Shell group, as well as RockPort Capital, Nth Power, and Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital participated in this second round.

Zen: Good for the soul, good for the bank account

Putting “zen” in front of a title seems a good way to bring in the millions. Zendesk raised $60 million in September and the Zen Garden is a $14 million penthouse apartment in New York City. Today, another “zen” company is joining their ranks.

Y Combinator startup ZenPayroll launched today and announced $6.1 million in seed funding, just barely edging out Funders Club from its pillar of largest YC seed round ever. ZenPayroll offers a cloud-based “delightful” payroll service. It has solutions to manage direct deposit and checks, vacation and sick days, electronic tax filing, reimbursement, deductions, and more.  While the lead investors were not disclosed, investors include notable enterprise entrepreneurs/angel investors CEO of Box Aaron Levie, CEO of Yammer David Zacks, CEO of Dropbox Drew Houston, CEO of SugarCRM Larry Augustin, as well as Google Ventures and Salesforce. Cofounders of YouTube, Yelp, and Badgeville also contributed.

Farmigo’s online farmer’s market dishes out fresh-from-harvest food to all

Farmigo is opening a farmer’s market platform today which connects farmers with local communities to make procuring fresh, seasonal, local products as easy as possible. The company also announced securing $8 million in financing. Farmigo started in 2009 as an online software provider to help farms manage their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs. With local food communities, it targets businesses and community groups of all sizes who are interested in creating their own farmer’s markets. The service is currently available in Northern California and New York City, and this funding will contribute to national expansion. This second round was led by Sherbrooke Capital and RSF Social Finance, and joined by Benchmark Capital, which led the Series A of $2 million in 2009. Read more on VentureBeat.

Hello Fresh reignites the art of cooking for Web 2.0

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 features five new, easy recipes created by professional chefs and nutritionists. Users select the meals they would like to prepare, and then a “personal sous chef” will assemble all the ingredients and mail a box to their door. The actual cooking is all that is left to do.

The company was founded in Berlin and currently operates in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, France, Australia, and the US. 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. Read more VentureBeat.

NatureBox adds to its bank account, not your waistline, for its healthy snack subscription service

Everybody loves to snack, but most of the snack options available in America are processed and contribute to our obesity epidemic. Rather than trying to curb people’s munching habits, NatureBox takes an e-commerce approach with its subscription service that delivers boxes filled with nutritionist-approved healthy snacks each month for $20. Unlike many other online subscription business, NatureBox creates its own products, without hugh fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, trans fats, artificial sweeteners, flavors or colors of any kind. This $2 million seed round, led by General Catalyst and Redpoint Ventures, will help NatureBox scale on the inventory side to meet anticipated growth.

Can you hear me now? Verizon Ventures invests in search technology

The venture arm of Verizon Communications has invested in Q-Sensei Corp, a company that offers an enterprise platform for search, discovery, and analytics. Q-Sensei leverages big data with a multi-dimensional search engine. The amount of this round has not been disclosed, although Verizon Ventures typically invests up to $5 million  in companies that could drive innovation for the parent company. Q-Sensei is based in Germany. Read the press release.

Professors apply beagle technology to make homes more connected

Growing up with a beagle, I am a sucker for anything Snoopy. Today, SNUPI Technologies (which, incidentally has nothing to do with beagles) raised $1.5 million. Far from napping atop doghouses, this company creates wireless sensor networks in homes using the wiring that is already in place to detect potential hazards. SNUPI stands for Sensor Network Utilizing Powerline Infrastrucutre. The project grew out of research conducted at the University of Washington and this financing will propel the technology to consumer-readiness. It was led by Madrona Venture Group and Radar Partners.

Speek, Memory 

Speek has raised $1.2 million for its visual calling platform that does not involve personal phone numbers, or bridge numbers and pins. All you need to set up a conference is a speek.com/user name link. Users can join calls by clicking the Speek link from their phone or the web and the service is free. CEO John Bracken formerly founded Evite.com and worked as a business development executive at AOL. Since launching Speek in June, the platform won Distilled Intellience 2.0, a pitch competition held by Microsoft and DC incubator/venture firm Fortify. It also received funding from 500 Startups and AOL’s Fishbowl Labs Incubator.

Waspit nails down $3 million to take the sting out of budgeting

Social banking platform Waspit secured $3 million from a group of New York-based angel investors. Waspit targets students to help them manage their finances. It offers a range of tools to help them make debit card and mobel payments, pay bills and make transfers, and split bills. The platform saves all the information so students can track their spending, and offers social engagement features to make banking more interactive and enjoyable. Waspit launched two months ago and has since built a user base of 5,500 students. This investment will contribute to sales and marketing, as well as adding new features.

Wink’s only shares your embarrassing moments with friends who already saw them

Photo-sharing. What a novel concept. Wink, yet another photo-sharing app, is announcing that it has raised a “significant” second round from Mangrove Capital Partners. Wink offers instant photo-sharing with only friends who are in photos with you. It uses algorithms to figure out which friends are nearby and automatically tags them. Rather than broadcasting a “drunk, silly, slightly out-of-focus” picture to your entire social network, Wink makes it easier to only share that photo with the people who were also involved in the “drunk, silly, slightly out-of focus” shenanigans.” Wink was initially founded under the name Evertale.

Owlin creates order out of online news chaos

Dutch startup Owlin secured $250K in seed financing for its system that uses machine learning to detect events and rank the news. The technology seeks to shows the buzz and reliability of news items to help users do in-depth analysis of news topics. It is targeted at financial institutions and governments to help them gain a better understanding of news on the web, which is particularly useful in the case of high-impact stories. NoRo Venture Capital led this round. Owlin came out of the Amsterdam-based Rockstart.Accelerator program.

Selectable Media joins Bing Fund to encourage people not to ignore ads

Selectable Media has joined the Bing Fund, an Microsoft run angel fund and incubator program. Selectable Media’s platform “tables consumers to unlock digital content and services in exchange for viewing and interacting with brand advertising.” Basically, it incentivizes people to click on ads. Ad publishers like NBC, Wendy’s Kraft, HBO and Samsung use Selectable Media to engage with consumers and monetize their content. Selectable Media raised $2 million from Aalon Ventures in October. Read a blog post from Bing Fund General Manager/Partner Rahul Sood.

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.

As much as I would like to regularly patronize a farmer’s market, time, location, and availability often stand in my way. Farmigo is opening a farmer’s market platform today which connects farmers with local communities to make procuring fresh, seasonal, local products as easy as possible. The company also announced securing $8 million in financing.

Farmigo started in 2009 as an online software provider to help farms manage their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs. By subscribing to a CSA programs, people can receive weekly boxes of produce directly from the farmers. Their popularity has increased over the years with the growth of the slow food movement and awareness surrounding healthy eating practices, but there was no software system to help the farmers track their operations.

Founder Benzi Ronen spent years working at enterprise software corporation SAP and left in 2000 to start his own companies. After having their first daughter, Ronen and his wife began to play closer attention to the food they ate as a family and grew familiar with the obstacles that existed for distributing local, seasonal, sustainable food. He set out to apply his logistics and software background to this market which was for the most part, devoid of technology.

“I saw that our food system is broken- this is making us sicker as people and making our planet sicker,” he said in an interview. “It isn’t that we need a shift in the industrial food system, we need to create a new food system based on different principles, and that alternative system needs infrastructure. We are already seeing an uptick in the number of local farms and CSA programs and the younger generation is getting back to farming. Now is the perfect time to introduce the consumer side to make eating farm fresh food more convenient.”

And thus, the team set out to create an online marketplace that eliminates the friction from buying fresh-from-harvest food. Farmigo takes a community-focused approach. Groups of people band together around a common location, like a workplace, school, or public meeting place. Through Farmigo’s network, they have access to a customized online farmer’s market, with a range of seasonal fruit, vegetables, eggs, meats, fish, baked goods, dairy, and even wine and coffee. Every week, each member of the community places an order and the orders are delivered at the same time and same place for pickup. This model offers convenience and variety, without sacrificing the degree of quality of sustainability.

“Only 1% of the population participates in CSAs, and that one-to-one relationship with the farm means you are limited to specifically what they grew that week,” he said. “Our mission was to make healthy food accessible to all households while also preserving the community feeling of farmer’s markets. We are about an economy of community instead of an economy of scale. We want the community members to rise up and be a part of the solution.”

To set up a Farmigo initiative, each community needs a “champion” to spearhead the effort. Groups must consist of 30 people or more, spending roughly $20 each. It has taken off within the startup community and early adopters include companies like Kiva, Etsy, and Carrot Creative.

“We are finding that young companies between 100 to 500 employees tend to have the spirit of willingness to try new things, they are the early adopters of the corporate world,” Ronen said. “In these companies, creativity and entrepreneurship are welcome and we are seeing that companies are starting to innovate around this. Many are integrating it into their health and wellness programs, using Farmigo credits as rewards for achieving milestones, and hold cooking competitions or recipe sharing events.”

Setting up a Farmigo community is currently available in Northern California and New York City. In conjunction with the initiative’s launch, Farmigo also announced the $8 million investment to continue spreading its platform nationwide. This is a hefty round for a food startup, which Ronen attributes to the company’s emphasis on the “non-sexy side of food.”

Farmigo’s back end enables farms to track what they are harvesting, manage their orders, organize distribution and packing, and facilitate delivery. This consumer-facing side closes the whole loop and investors trust in the potential for stability and growth. This second round was led by Sherbrooke Capital and RSF Social Finance, and joined by Benchmark Capital, which led the Series A of $2 million in 2009.

Our parents told us not to trust strangers, and while this wisdom is primarily applicable to issues of safety, it applies to food as well. LocalSpin is an iPhone app that lets people share recommendations on restaurants, bars, and cafes with people win their social network. Rather than trusting 250 anonymous strangers on Yelp or the high falutin’ opinion of a food critic, users can access their friends’ preferences to decide where to eat. The New York City company has raised $250K from a group of local angel investors.

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.

Startup Spotlight is a new weekly series that features a company with a unique idea or story to tell. If your company would like to be considered, please submit an application at http://venturebeat.com/news-tips/.

Food porn is not for all, but those who do get a rise out of obscene photos of dishes should check out Yelp. The rest of you, shield your eyes, because what you’re going to find on Yelp’s new menu pages may be hard to stomach.

Business reviews company Yelp today introduced visual menus that incorporate people-captured candids of restaurants’ menu items. Yelp released menus across its website, mobile website, and mobile applications.

The menus represent Yelp’s first official attempt to provide people with a complete list of a restaurant’s dining options. The company untangled the mess that was user-added photos and dish-related reviews to create its photo-enhanced menus.

Yum, yum?

Yelpers can access the dedicated visual menu pages from the “Explore the Menu” link on a business page. When they do, they’ll find a list of menu items with prices, pictures, and reviews for each dish. People can click on individual dishes to view even more photos and read up on the item’s appeal, or lack thereof, from those who’ve mentioned the particular dish in a Yelp review. So vegans, vegetarians, and those grossed out by indecent food photos, be careful what you click on!

A company spokesperson told VentureBeat that the menu release is Yelp’s first product launched across all three of its properties: web, mobile web, and mobile apps. Yelp is rolling out menus to business pages in the U.S. starting today.

Photo credit: Simon Willison/Flickr

‘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

Ziplist, the startup that makes it easier to share and discover recipes, has launched its first set of features since being acquired for a reported $14 million by Condé Nast this April.

The company, which operates independently from Condé, claims to have grown its user base to over a million people. Ziplist lets you browse recipes and assemble shopping lists, which you can sync to an iPhone and Android phone. It has strong appeal for publishers and food bloggers too, who can download a free Ziplist plugin that helps format recipes for SEO purposes.

It has partnered up with food-focused blogs as well as lifestyle and entertainment brands — notably, Martha Stewart Living and the Food Network — to populate its database of over 500,000 free recipes.

The company hits on a new trend for tech startups to bridge online and offline worlds. With Ziplist, if you see something delicious at the grocery store (but would prefer to make it from scratch in your own kitchen), you can scan the item’s barcode and convert the ingredients into a handy shopping list.

Since the acquisition, the company has also worked to build out an algorithm. The new feature set boasts personalized recommendations so you won’t have to browse thousands of recipes to find one that appeals. Updates to the app include:

• Personal recommendations: A new “recipes you may like” feature provides recommendations based on recipes that you’ve saved.
• Shopping list suggestions: An “Items you may need” grocery list based on your most popular selections, like milk or eggs.
• Recipe of the day: The trending recipe  – save it to your recipe  box or add items to your shopping list if you decide to give it a whirl.

Geoff Allen, Ziplist’s founder and chief executive said these “intuitive grocery list suggestions and personalized meal recommendations” make it easier to help users shop. With this new direction, the company faces competition from startups like Foodily, a recipe networking site, and Gojee, which targets users with personalized recipe recommendations.

However, with Condé on board as a publishing partner, Ziplist may have the best shot at reaching a broader audience. Still, I’m not convinced that the core market (people that pour over recipes and painstakingly plan meals) are digital natives. Foodies, do you break out the old recipe book, or do you routinely turn to your smartphones for culinary tips?

Image via Shutterstock 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Dining out with friends is usually a pleasant experience — until the check comes. A startup called Foodivide just released a mobile app that makes it easier to settle restaurant tabs by providing bill-splitting tools.

Let’s say four people partook in a long leisurely meal together, with bottles of wine, shared appetizers, entrees, and a dessert or two for the table. One person only drank water, two people ordered steaks that out-cost the vegetarian options, and the diner on a diet abstained from chocolate cake.

Enter Foodivide.

Upon opening the app, every eater is given a plate icon to “drag and drop” the items they consumed. If three people shared a dish, a tap of the screen divides that amount three ways and then the smaller number can be dropped into the individual plates. Once everything is divvied up, each person has a final tally.

“My friends and I love going out to eat, but splitting a bill with a group of friends can be such a pain,” said founder Daniel Shein. “I wanted to create an app that would get this part over with as quickly as possible.”

According to a census study, over 45 million Americans eat out at least once a week and spend an average of $3,000 a year at restaurants.

Shein’s goal with Foodivide isn’t just to help friends divvy up bills. His ultimate vision is to use data collected through the app to provide greater insight into people’s eating habits. By keeping a log of food consumption and spending patterns, users will be able to see where their money goes.

“As soon as you start inputting, you create a history and a profile,” he said. “I want to present users with an interface for them to see ‘holy cow, I spent $1,000 on burgers and I don’t even like them that much’.

In the next iteration of the app, Shein is aiming for an integration with FourSquare, so rather than manually inputting item costs, diners can simply select the items from menus. This will also give restaurants insights about who their greatest customers are.

Dozens of food apps already exist, although most of them target other parts of the eating experience. GrubWithUs is a social networking centered around dining, Foodspotting focuses on sharing images of delicious dishes, and Zagat and UrbanSpoon offer recommendations and reviews. A few apps deal with paying the bill, like Tabbedout and Tipulator, but this is the first we’ve heard of that deals specifically with group dining scenarios.

Foodivide is the latest project of Shein, who has been developing mobile apps since 2005. He has founded a number of startups, created multiple popular apps like Lookator and SignMeOut, and was a finalist in last year’s Kind of Code contest.

Culture Kitchen co-founders Abby Sturges and Jennifer Lopez want to share treasured recipes that have been passed down through generations of families. The San Francisco-based startup has turned home-cooking expertise into a viable small business.

Full disclosure: I was enrolled in a design and business class with the founders at Stanford.

Culture Kitchen connects foodies with local cooks willing to share tantalizing, home-cooked, ethnic food. ”These are men and women who have immigrated to the US and brought with them their incredible generations old recipes,” the team explains on its Kickstarter page. “No fancy chefs here, just really passionate people who love cooking and love sharing their culture through food.”

The founders hope to raise $150,000 on the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform. In the first 24 hours since launching the funding page, they have already received over $8,000 in financing. If successful, they plan to develop six new cooking kits, which will include live videos filled with advice from the chefs. In the current form, the pre-packaged kits contain all the ingredients, 3 recipes with step-by-step directions and photos, and personal mementos from the cooks.

Culture Kitchen’s co-founders, mother’s with no formal training, spend months compiling recipes and rooting out hard-to-find ingredients for the kits. Place an order through the company’s website, and learn to cook Paloma’s Poblano Mole or Suchrita’s Chicken Tikka — personalization is core to the user experience. Included are tips and tricks from the chefs, so you’ll feel like you’ve inherited a family recipe.

Culture Kitchen’s co-founders, Jennifer Lopez and Abby Sturges

When I knew the two at Stanford, they were focused on organizing cooking classes to bring a second income to women who loved to cook, mainly drawn from nearby neighborhoods like East Palo Alto. Meanwhile, wealthy students from the university with limited skills in the kitchen were eagerly participating in the cooking classes, often held in local community centers. Suddenly, the smell of pumpkin curry was wafting through dorm rooms, replacing the usual ramen and Mac ‘n’ Cheese.

“Students often left classes inspired to go recreate dishes at home,” said Sturges in an interview with VentureBeat. “Sadly, they would report that they weren’t able to navigate the ethnic markets we sent them to and couldn’t get the ingredients they needed.”

This feedback inspired the team to eke out a new model to scale the business. Now they work with 15 master chefs and send kits to hundreds of subscribers on a monthly basis. It’s great for a dinner party of 4 to 6 people, or you could make like Jolie O’Dell (our resident domestic goddess) and singlehandedly prepare a week’s worth of recipes.

In a foodie city like San Francisco, we are inundated with options. Why choose to order a kit through Culture Kitchen? The founders feel they are onto something unique with the subscription model and the mingling of cooking and culture. “You know we all eat every day, and some of us cook every day.  That felt like such an untapped opportunity, taking the mundane activity and super charging it with meaning,” said Lopez.

Image courtesy of The Peninsula Press

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

My phone is full of pictures of the dishes I try at new restaurants, and now these tasty shots have a place to go beyond my SD card. Previously available on the iPhone, Evernote Food launches Thursday for Android devices. Use the app to document your meals in  pictures and words. It will then back up that info to Evernote’s main note-keeping service.

Being a photo-obsessed foodie, I wish this app was around during my European travels, which were full of the best food I’ve ever eaten. Memories of pasta in Italy, pastries in France, and Thai food in London would live on in my Evernote account, not just in my brain.

The app uses your smartphone camera to capture the location, details, and photos of your favorite meals. Using Foursquare data, the app records the location of the restaurant or café where you’re enjoying your unforgettable meal. You can tag each post by cuisine, memorable event, or even ingredients to help you remember the experience and tastes when you want to reminisce (or maybe it’s just me that still thinks about what I ate in a café in Paris when I was 15).

Because we can’t help but share everything we do, especially what we eat, you can share your posts to other social network apps already on your phone. I know I’m guilty of tweeting pictures of my meals.

Food lets you capture each item from a meal and lump them together in one meal note. Once you take a picture and start to tag your meal, the app will display related notes of what it thinks might be related to your post, such as a recipe stored in Evernote.

Evernote Food is available for free in the Google Play store. It joins another app from the company that recently came to the Android side, Evernote Hello.

French pastry image via Flickr user Mike & Anna

Imagine a soup-to-nuts app that would let you find a good restaurant nearby, make a reservation, order, and pay all in a few clicks and swipes — and imagine the restauranteurs in your area have the same level of sophistication and technological access.

Imagine sitting down at a restaurant, viewing a menu on your phone, then ordering and paying for your food with a mobile phone, as well. Imagine your server taking your order on his phone and delivering it to the digitally wired kitchen, all in an instant.

That sort of end-to-end tech for restaurants and diners is what Pham Khac Tan imagined back in 2010 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Tan was a dentist by trade and had worked for and owned other businesses in healthcare and distribution ; however, the entrepreneur told VentureBeat, “I always dreamed about making my own products in Vietnam and marketing them to the U.S. and international [markets].”

Tan pointed out during our interview that around 42,000 restaurants open every year, and 30 percent of them close within their first year of operations. New restaurants are also notoriously slow to reach profitability, and they can constitute a huge risk for investors and business owners. Tan saw the issues and risk as an opportunity.

He identified three major issues to address first with an digital system, Bynow [site still in stealth]. First, restaurants carry a very high startup cost. Second, the business management side is quite complicated. Third, finding and keeping customers is a huge challenge.

Bynow, Tan said, can help to reduce costs, simplify management, and make marketing and retention a lot easier. The app itself is a rather sprawling piece of technology that acts as an all-in-one problem solver for both restauranteurs and their customers. On the marketing side, Bynow provides mechanisms for creating deals and promoting events. It acts as a food ordering system — and as a former waitress myself, I know how badly that software needs a refresh. And for customers, it’s the social, searchable sort of app we’ve come to expect in the food category.

One of Bynow’s biggest problems, however, is its ambition. It’s attempting to cure all the ills of the food service industry with a single magic bullet. Tan struggled to make the app understandable in a long, complicated demonstration onstage here at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., which doesn’t bode well for the app’s usability.

Whether the app and the concept of an end-to-end food service platform take off remains to be seen, but Tan truly is thinking big and attempting to bring futuristic concepts into current realities.

To date, Bynow’s 50-person team has taken a small amount of funding from friends and family, as well as from market experts in finance and IT. The company’s next steps, said Tan, including moving his team to Silicon Valley, building out a U.S. team, and prepping for a summer 2012 launch.

Bynow is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Image courtesy of conrado, Shutterstock

Edamam, a portmanteau of the Slavic and Sanskrit words for “eat,” is launching at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. The site and app offer multiple ways to search and filter recipes, by simply typing what you’re hungry for, by diet (such as vegan, dairy-free, or high-protein), or by calories. The recipes are pulled in from a variety of reliable sources, including the New York Times, Food.com, and Epicurious.

The mobile product includes more than just recipes. The database also has detailed nutritional information, including the amount of fat, carbs, and sodium in a dish. And there are companion shopping lists, and you can check off items on the app as you shop.

“Although it may be a cliché, we see our efforts at Edamam as a way to make a real difference in the world,” said founder Victor Penev. “We believe that with the power of technology, we can help people make better food choices, eat better and ultimately be happier for it.”

Edamam is entering a crowded field of food-search apps, including Yummly and Foodily. The company wants to set itself apart from the competitors by focusing on health, speed, and surfacing selected high-quality recipes. The search tool is just the first product from a company with the ambitious mission to “organize the world’s food knowledge,” and it plans on releasing additional products in the coming year.

The two-year-old company currently has nine full-time employees. The initial funding was thrown in by Penev, who has gone on to raise an additional $800,000 from other individuals.

[Update: On stage, Penev (pictured below) showed the app working on an iPhone. He joked, "This is so not 2001." ]

Edamam is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Home and garden, arts and crafts, style and fashion: These are the categories that everyone knows already dominate the red-hot digital pin-board site Pinterest. But the people of Pinterest, according to new data, are less cookie-cutter and more cookie-maker.

In fact, food is the fastest-growing and most viral category on Pinterest, according to e-commerce analytics platform RJMetrics.

The still private-beta Pinterest is where 10 million members, typically branded as arts and crafts enthusiasts, “pin” and “re-pin” (share) products, photos, recipes, clothes, and so forth, usually from other websites. It’s an image-centric site, where pinned images appear on shared collections called boards. Launched in 2010, the social network for pinning has catapulted to a top 10 social site and could be worth as much $500 million.

To better understand the content people are pinning on Pinterest, RJMetrics looked at roughly one million pins spread across thousands of pin-boards from 9,200 different users. As expected, the most popular board categories are home (17.2 percent of boards fall into the home category), arts and crafts (12.4 percent), and style and fashion (11.7 percent). But the analytics company has found one rather unexpected trend: food-related pinning is quickly taking hold of the site.

Accounting for 10.5 percent of boards, food is the fourth most popular category on Pinterest. The food category has climbed the charts over the past year and, when it comes to new boards, is now more popular than the fashion category. Content in the food category is also the most likely to be repinned. Food generates, on average, 50 percent more re-pins than the number two most repinned category, style and fashion.

“I think [this is] reflective of Pinterest picking up a more mass-market user base,” RJMetrics founder and CEO Robert Moore told VentureBeat. “The site started out with a strong following among style and fashion enthusiasts, but that market is only so large. As more of the general population flocks to the site, it’s only natural that more broadly applicable categories (like food) rise to the top.”

Interestingly enough, the products category, while representing just 2.1 percent of boards, is the most likely category to be liked. The propensity for members to publicly pass along their approbation for products should bode well for the young startup as it stabs at commercialization tactics moving forward, RJMetrics concluded.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Online food-ordering company Seamless has brought its ordering and menus to the iPad today — a move that hungry couch potatoes will likely applaud.

Seamless currently competes with smaller-but-still-potent startup GrubHub for online delivery and pickup order supremacy. Seamless’ last big move was acquiring MenuPages for New York Media so it could add 35,000 menus and 175,000 user-generated restaurant reviews to its data base.

Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky told VentureBeat that the company decided to launch an iPad app because it’s seeing increasing traffic from mobile apps, with 25 percent of order volume now coming from mobile alone. But when you add the iPad in the mix and you have to think a little different, he said.

“The iPad is part of a multi-platform approach,” Zabusky said. “Seventy percent of iPad usage is from home, so we’ve added a greatest emphasis on discovery.”

The iPad application is set up so that after you login, it takes you to a screen featuring two plates with the text that reads: “I’ll have the usual” and “Show me the menus.” The first plate takes you to restaurants you’ve ordered from in the past as well as the most popular choices in your area. The second plate option allows you to look at menus and high-definition photos of restaurant cuisine you haven’t tried.

“Customers wanted photos and menus to be more prominent,” Zabusky said. “We especially wanted to bring photos to life.”

The iPad app will also feature more social functionality than the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android apps, including the ability to rate restaurants and “like” menu items. Zabusky believes iPad users will spend more time using the app than they would the phone versions. So, it was a priority to have some extra functionality.

New York-based Seamless now serves 12 U.S. major metropolitan areas. It has processed more than $1.5 billion in sales since 2004 and completed more than $400 million in sales in 2011. Seamless generates revenue by taking a cut from each food purchase made through its service — the company keeps a 10 percent commission on average.

You can view a gallery of Seamless for iPad photos below:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Forkly, an app that helps you find popular dishes at restaurants around you, has released version 2.0 with bigger photos and personalized recommendations.

Forkly launched in September 2011 from Britekite founders Brady Becker and Martin May. The app originally helped you photograph, rate, and share dishes you’ve eaten and loved. With the second version of the app, you can share and find dishes more easily. The app now delivers personalized recommendations of dishes and the ability to browse restaurants anywhere.

Perhaps the most noticeable update in the new version is the larger images, which help you browse dishes more quickly. The app also gives you influence points for using the app and rating dishes, and the update has improved how points are handled.

Forkly competes with Foodspotting, another app that rates specific dishes. Both apps have very similar features and are fighting for the same users. Forkly’s influence point system is absent in Foodspotting, but Foodspotting includes “Guides” of popular and noteworthy dishes curated by foodie celebrities. Other Forkly competitors include Spoondate and Ness.

Forkly 2.0 is available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

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.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The other night, over a heated (ha ha) conversation about soup, a new acquaintance asked me, “So, what’s the best soup in San Francisco?”

Being a huge fan of soup (I lead an exciting life), I wished I had an answer to that question. But how to find out? Ask all my fellow soup fiends at the next Soupaholics Anonymous meeting? Organize a soup crawl of every restaurant in the city?

In the end, it was a question for Foodspotting, an app that until now has borne the somewhat inaccurate subheading “the Instagram for foodies.”

Yes, the app is replete with pictures of drool-worthy restaurant dishes, but today’s redesign makes it easier than ever to lurk without snapping pics yourself, to discover new dishes, to filter out the noise, and to get recommendations from real experts on foods you love.

To wit, I could open the app and search for “soup” to see great soups at nearby restaurants.

While browsing soups, I can see how many people in general recommend a particular soup; I can also see how many true soup aficionados recommend the soup and whether a soup is recommended by a partner publication, such as the SF-insidery 7×7 magazine or Travel and Leisure. If I’ve been around town for a while and am familiar with the soupscape, I can filter my search to show only the latest, newest soups.

And then, I can put my phone away, waltz into a restaurant, and boldly order the beet bisque, knowing beyond hesitation that I will soon be tasting one of the very best soups in San Francisco.

“Even the idea of food porn, it sounds like you’re looking just for the sake of looking,” said Foodspotting co-founder and CEO Alexa Andrzejewski in a recent conversation at her startup’s SF office. ”I want to get people out in the world, trying the food they find.”

Here’s a brief demo of the new app at work:

Within the redesigned app, you can also permanently hide dishes or entire categories if you don’t want to see them recommended for you. Don’t like sea urchin or beef tripe? Just tap twice, and you’ll never see those foods in your feed again.

Andrzejewski calls these features “Pandora-like”.

“If you just want to use it to discover, you can keep a checklist of great dishes around the city… For those who aren’t big foodies, if you’re just looking for someplace to eat, it works on that level, too,” she said.

Andrzejewski also said the app comes in handy when you’re at a new restaurant with a perplexing panoply of menu options and don’t know what to pick.

“It’s like a picture menu for anywhere,” she said. “You can sit down at a restaurant and without looking over anyone’s shoulder, you can see the must-try dishes. I think that’s the use case with the biggest market.”

And while many apps these days are focusing on showing you recommendations from your friends, the Foodspotting app recognizes that even the closest of friends can have radically different palates. While you can get recommendations from your buddies, Andrzejewski said, “What’s more relevant than being friends is knowing that I’m similar to you in taste.”

For revenue options, two-year-old Foodspotting has tapped ScoutMob for partnership. The startup is testing local “specials” at restaurants. All the user has to do is show the special on the phone screen to the participating food vendor, and he or she gets a discount.

“We’re also building relationships with restaurants, helping restaurants communicate with people who are looking for food,” Andrzejewski revealed.

As our conversation continued, we meandered down delicious tangents — sushi burritos (Foodspotting recommends one near the VentureBeat office in the city’s financial district), goat cheese ice cream with raspberry sauce, the quest for the perfect Shanghai soup dumpling (“I’m actually a dumpling expert on Foodspotting,” said Andrzejewski, who has “spotted” amazing dumplings around the world), and a pie milkshake at local hotspot Chile Pies.

All these dishes are things I probably wouldn’t find, even in my own city, without using an app like Foodspotting. During the conversation, I found myself taking notes not just about the app, but about all the foods I wanted to look up on the app when I got home.

Ultimately, the best thing about Foodspotting is that it’s helping us find these amazing treats within our favorite neighborhoods or in new cities.

“When people say we’re the Instragram of food, it sounds like this is a niche thing that’s only for foodies,” said Andrezejewski. “I don’t even like the word ‘foodie’… I think everyone wants to try the best thing when they go out.”

Image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Grubwithus, the social-dining startup that helps people meet over meals in real-life, has launched an official iPhone app. The free mobile app is a promising step toward a future service that allows people to spontaneously book meals amongst themselves anytime, anywhere.

The service is already known for its “in-real-life” approach to social networking, bringing strangers together for prix fixe meals that are negotiated with partner restaurants beforehand. The social goals are very open-ended: people use the service to date, to professionally network, or to check out new eateries. It’s all up to the user.

The new app extends all the functionality of the website to the iPhone. It lets you search for and reserve meals, which you can easily pay for with a secure mobile payments system. Before you even sit down for your meal the check is split, tipped and paid. The app also carries over some of the existing social features of the website, namely chatting with friends you’ve made over past meals and viewing their profiles and meal histories.

The app is beautifully designed, with a lot of attention to detail around its wood-based zen aesthetic. iPhone app aficionados may notice Grubwithus has forgone the Apple default iPhone user interface buttons and layouts that most developers work off. Instead, it has opted for a custom-crafted look that reflects the humble, counter-intuitive take on social networking the company is going for. The company will design apps for Android and tablet users next.

I’ve tested the app and it appears fairly stable and fluid, but I haven’t had a chance to book a meal on it, though I have booked several meals through the website in the past, to great (delicious) success.

The app is sure to make the Grubwithus process smoother. In the service’s earlier days, people had to print out “reservation cards” that had directions to their meal, a brief menu overview, and their name written in giant letters. The printouts were problematic: many people didn’t print them out, and restaurants were unsure about using them to confirm guests. I personally ran into these issues at most of my meals. The app changes all that, since it handily includes all the same information.

But the app goes beyond just replicating the old reservation cards. It also adds a social layer that was lacking on the website. Under a tab called “People,” you can scroll through a feed of your friends’ activity, and will receive push notifications when those friends book meals. This solves the problem of meal discovery many people had previously reported.

Co-founder Daishin Sugano also hinted to me that the new app will feature a photo component, dipping in the waters of crowded food “sharing” and recommendation startups like Foodspotting, Nosh, Chewsy, and Forkly. The app is aware of when you’re actually in a meal, and if you open it, there’ll be a photo button allowing you to take a photo and upload it to the site. What will happen with these photos is currently unclear, but Sugano says they have plans for something “more sophisticated” than competitors.

Despite these new features, the app is really a baby step toward the larger goal of allowing people to spontaneously meet for meals anytime, anywhere. This future hyper-connected meal-matrix is foreshadowed by the company’s recently launched “Create-a-Meal” feature that lets users setup their own meals with partner restaurants (a feature that’s soon to arrive on the iPhone). And as Grubwithus partners with more and more restaurants that see the value they’re adding, users will be able to pick spots and times on-the-fly, use geo-location to find one another, pay through the already established mobile payment system, and meet for their meal.

Grubwithus has over 30,000 registered users and a growing base of restaurant partners that currently tops over 650 nationwide. It received $1.6 million in May 2011 for its first round of funding after successfully completing the Y Combinator program. The Grubwithus iPhone app is available for free at the Apple App Store here.

By adding the “Say Mmm” tag to any note in Evernote, a shopping list will be automatically generated with quantities for each ingredient and estimated nutritional information of the recipe. Say Mmm will even categorize each ingredient for you based on grocery store sections and remind you check if you need ingredients that most people keep stocked at all times, such as flour and sugar. Each recipe with the Say Mmm tag will have its own list created, but you can easily merge multiple lists together for one shopping trip.

Say Mmm acknowledges that the list generation feature isn’t perfect and sometimes ingredients can get accidentally left out. To use the new features, all you have to do is sign into Say Mmm with your Evernote account and authorize access. Once you return to Evernote, you will see a new Say Mmm folder.

One of Evernote’s competitors, Springpad, has a similar list making feature as well. You can add ingredients to a list you’ve already created or start a new shopping list from any saved recipe. However, Springpad doesn’t categorize ingredients; every item just shows up in a list in the order it was added.

BiteHunter is a real-time search engine that lets you seek out dining deals from over 400 different sources, including Facebook, Twitter, Groupon and LivingSocial. It also gives you info about restaurants and reviews from others — sort of like a Kayak for eating out.

The company plans to use the new funding to grow its presence on mobile platforms. BiteHunter is already available on the iPhone, but it will soon be available on the iPad and Android, co-founder Gil Harel told VentureBeat.

The company is working on two big additions to its mobile app experience. The first is a new notifications system that will send out customized dining alerts based on a user’s social activity on Facebook, Foursquare and other social networks. The second addition will allow BiteHunter users to purchase deals within the app.

“One of the problems many deal aggregators have is that when you send someone outside of the app to make the purchase for the deal, those third parties don’t always support mobile. The users have to sign in again, re-enter credit card information … the user experience is not great,” said Harel.

Both the new notification system and the in-purchase functionality is scheduled to roll out in early 2012, Harel said.

Founded in 2010, the New York-based company previously raised $250,000 in angel funding. The new round is led by angel investors Avraham Kadar and Eyal Chomsky and brings the startup’s total funding to $1.05 million to date. The startup faces indirect competition from Yelp, CitySearch and UrbanSpoon.

“There is not a more hyper-local market than the restaurant space,” Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky told VentureBeat. “MenuPages is one of the most trusted and accurate services for menus, so it will add a lot to our service.”

The online food ordering market market is heating up. Last week smaller-but-still-significant Seamless competitor GrubHub acquired Dotmenu and raised $50 million with funding led by Lightspeed Ventures.

The biggest thing Seamless will get from the MenuPages deal will be the service’s database of 35,000 menus and 175,000 user-generated restaurant reviews from more than 50 cities around the world.

“We’ve been partnered with MenuPages for two years, so we knew the quality of what we were getting,” Zabusky said. “The companies that MenuPages already has relationships with will definitely be ones we approach in the future about selling orders on Seamless.”

Seamless was formerly known as SeamlessWeb and has done $1.5 billion in sales since 2004. The company expects to complete $400 million in sales for 2011. Seamless generates revenue by taking a cut from each food purchase made through its service — the company keeps a 10 percent commission on average.

MenuPages was sold off by New York Media, which has owned the company since 2008. New York Media will still offer its popular Grub Street food blogs in partnership with MenuPages.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Farmigo wants you to eat more vegetables. The new group-buying site for locally grown farm produce, meat, fish, and other edible goods launched today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.

Groups of people can sign up with local farms and buy farm-fresh goods in bulk through the site. Farmigo then organizes deliveries of the produce, dairy, or meat from the producers directly to nearby pickup locations. The producers set a minimum number of people who have to sign up for the farm purchase before they start delivering to a location. The site already has around 1,500 pickup locations.

Farmigo takes a transaction fee for each payment that goes through the site. Growers can also sign up for Farmigo, which gives each farm in-depth analytics about the number of people signing up for a group deal, or how many people are buying from specific pickup locations.

“Already we have farms that are going direct to the consumer, but they don’t scale and are a bit fragmented,” said Farmigo chief executive Benzi Ronen.

Farmigo is based in Palo Alto, California. The company was founded in August, 2009 and has raised $2 million in funding.