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.

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:

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.

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

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

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.

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.