SOURCE: Foodista, LLC

December 17, 2008 09:38 ET

Foodista.com Launches, Enlists Food Bloggers and Culinary Students to Build World's Largest Cooking Encyclopedia

New Website Makes It Easier to Learn and Share About Cooking With Better Search, Community Editing and Social Features

SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwire - December 17, 2008) - Today a team of Internet veterans launched an innovative website, http://www.foodista.com, the first to organize and cross-link the basic elements of cooking:

FOODS: As they are produced naturally, or with minimal processing, like eggs, salt, and apples;

COOKING TECHNIQUES: Methods of preparing foods such as baking, peeling, and braising;

KITCHEN TOOLS: All the gadgets and appliances used to make meals, including saucepans, chef's knifes, and blenders;

RECIPES: Combinations of foods, tools, and techniques.

Emphasizing the visual beauty of cooking, the website includes thousands of high resolution photos from the Flickr.com Creative Commons. Users can also upload their own photos.

COMMUNITY EDITING

With a focus on quality over quantity, Foodista developed a system to let anyone edit the site to make it better and instantly publish. "Wikipedia.org, Wikihow.com and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com) proved that everyday people can come together to build incredibly comprehensive information resources online. We created a place for people excited about food to share their knowledge with the world," said Barnaby Dorfman, founder and CEO.

CULINARY STUDENTS CONTRIBUTE

With growing interest in cooking, enrollment in culinary schools has swelled to record numbers. Recognizing the vast and diverse talents of cooking school programs, Foodista invited contributions from students at several leading programs, including:

* The French Culinary Institute (http://www.frenchculinary.com)
* The International Culinary Schools at the Art Institutes
  (http://www.artinstitutes.edu/culinary/)
* The Seattle Culinary Academy (http://seattlecentral.edu/seattleculinary)

Paul Redman, Chef Instructor at the Seattle Art Institute, said, "Our students are passionate about the art of cooking. This great new site offers them a way to learn and share knowledge beyond classroom and kitchen."

TOOLS FOR FOOD BLOGGERS

Food is a very popular blog subject, with thousands of people who write about cooking for the love of it. Foodista developed innovative technology for connecting cooking information across websites; these links help bloggers build traffic and improve search engine rankings. Future widgets will allow food writers to include whole recipes from the Foodista database for free.

"Writing about food online is a social thing. We share our tastes, experiments, likes and dislikes with the world through our blogs. I love the way that Foodista helps us make those connections," noted Keren Brown, the Frantic Foodie (http://www.franticfoodie.blogspot.com). Other popular food blogs with links to Foodista.com include http://www.cornichon.org and http://www.herbivoracious.com.

ABOUT FOODISTA

Foodista, LLC is a privately held Seattle company that leverages open source software, cloud computing resources, and wisdom of the crowds to rapidly develop cooking software and content. Combined, the founders have decades of Internet development experience and are all veterans of Amazon.com. Barnaby Dorfman, founder and CEO, created the first gourmet food category on Amazon.com in 1999 and was vice president of their search technology division.