Recent News 2008

October 10, 2008
Lisa Sharples is president of Allrecipes.com, one of the top cooking websites. She joined the Seattle company in May 2007, about a year after it was acquired by The Reader’s Digest Association. Right now she’s focused on rolling out Allrecipes.com in other countries, starting with Britain and Australia, with France and Germany to follow.

Tell me about Allrecipes’ international expansion. As Allrecipes expanded over the years, we noticed a lot of the traffic coming from international, primarily English-speaking countries — Canada, the U.K., Australia, and even non-English speaking countries ... We felt we could build a global community of chefs who are all sharing recipes. The top recipes that are used by people in the U.K., and rated and ranked by people in the U.K., could be translated back in terms of ingredients and measurings to the U.S. and vice versa. So if you’re interested in finding the best recipe for trifle, you can find it from someone in the U.K.

How do you distinguish yourself from all the other recipe websites out there? We actually are one of the largest food sites. We’re No. 2 right after Foodtv. Our growth over a year-to-year basis is faster than the food category overall online. We feel like in some ways we are very different than they are. We are really a social media site. If you look at the top 10 food sites online, we are really without a doubt the biggest social media site in the food space. If you look at the women’s category, which we look at as well, we’re the No. 1 social media site for women. We’re much bigger than iVillage.

As Food Budgets Are Put on a Diet
September 29, 2008
With food prices rising, Americans want more caloric bang for their buck. The chart here gives an indication of their hierarchy of food-money-saving actions (or, at least, intentions). It draws on a poll conducted in August and September by Allrecipes.com, a social network for chowhounds. One other info morsel: Among respondents who aim to economize by changing the foods they put in their kids’ school lunches, 76 percent said they will “buy fewer prepackaged lunches.”

General Mills Reduces TV Use to Reintroduce Chex Mix
Print, Web at Reader's Digest Association Includes Rachael Ray, Allrecipes.com
September 16, 2008
CHICAGO (AdAge.com) -- When General Mills set out to reinvigorate its Chex cereal brand and its party-mix recipe, the company wanted to connect with home cooks on a personal level. The result: an online and print buy with Reader's Digest properties -- and a dramatic reduction in broadcast-TV spending.








General Mills is looking to reinvigorate its Chex party mix brand.

Chex brand manager Rohan Thakur admits the brand's heyday was likely in the 1970s and 1980s. However, the company found that a number of cooks were still interested in sharing their own party-mix recipes. So Chex is offering "5 recipes, 15 minutes and lots of wows," in "Every Day With Rachael Ray" and "Taste of Home" magazines, and at Allrecipes.com. An online contest will determine "America's favorite Chex party mix."

"We've got to start thinking of TV as only one piece of the marketing, as opposed to a year ago when it was the lion's share of the spend," Mr. Thakur said. He declined to disclose the size of the campaign.

More parents packing lunches for kids
September 15, 2008
Rising food prices are changing parents’ plans for schoolchildren’s lunches, according to a survey conducted by Allrecipes.com. The survey, conducted on the food social network’s website, found that 84% of parents plan to prepare more lunches at home and fewer than 17% plan to buy school lunches. Also, 85% of parents said they plan to bring their lunches from home. More than 600 members participated in the survey, which was conducted from Aug. 27 to Sept. 5, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Consumers Spending More on Groceries This Year: Survey
May 29, 2008
SEATTLE — Sixty percent of respondents to a recent online survey conducted by Allrecipes here reported they were spending more on groceries than one year ago. In addition, the survey revealed that 54% were more mindful of grocery prices; 32% were preparing more meals at home; and 22% were buying more store brands. The survey tapped 750 Allrecipes.com households where 90% of the respondents identified themselves as their family’s primary grocery buyer. A third-party research group independently analyzed the data.

Hard-Pressed Consumers Eating In More Often
Spam sales rise; so do store brands
May 29, 2008
High gas prices and an ailing economy are driving consumers to the grocery store instead of their favorite restaurant, a survey finds. Perhaps even more telling, Spam sales are up, Hormel reports.

Sixty percent of respondents to an online survey conducted by Allrecipes reported they were spending more on groceries than one year ago.

In addition, the survey revealed that 54% were more mindful of grocery prices; 32% were preparing more meals at home; and 22% were buying more store brands. The survey tapped 750 Allrecipes.com households where 90% of the respondents identified themselves as their family’s primary grocery buyer. A third-party research group independently analyzed the data.

How do you feel about your groceries? Here's the skinny
May 23, 2008
The results are in on Americans and their tangled relationships with their groceries. First, according to the Consumer Reports offshoot Shop Smart, we tend to waste the things that are meant to help us not waste food. American women spend about $100 on disposable food storage and wrapping items per year (we can assume men spend a fraction of that)—plastic being the preferred material. About half get thrown away rather than recycled.

We trust the grocery store more this year than last: the Food Marketing Institute’s 2008 Grocery Shopper Trends report says our confidence in grocery store food safety has gone up to 80 percent (last year it was at an 18-year low 66 percent); also: male baby boomers, the rich, and the young (25 to 39 year olds) are more concerned about the quality of their diet than others; more than half of us wish our grocery stores sold reusable shopping bags and will buy locally grown products if they’re available; and 77 percent of us are not comfortable with the idea of eating a cloned animal product.

Finally, from Allrecipes.com’s online survey conducted this spring: 60 percent of us are spending more groceries than we did a year ago, 54 percent are more mindful of grocery prices; 32 percent are preparing more meals at home and 22 percent are buying store brands. Any questions?

Web feast of frugal meals
As food prices climb, sites offering low-cost recipes boom.
May 20, 2008
Here's an upside to soaring food prices: big gains for certain websites.

At www.allrecipes.com, traffic to low-budget and quick-and-easy recipes has nearly doubled over the last three months. www.thriftyfun.com recorded more than 4 million page views in March, almost twice the number than in the same month last year. And www.hillbillyhousewife.com, not known for recipes involving truffle oil or sauteed chanterelles, has more visitors too.…

Allrecipes.com began tracking interest in ground beef and pasta in January, and it has since risen 107% and 74%, respectively. Visits have also increased to the "10 Meals on $10" pages. The website's articles sing the praises of porcupines (balls of ground beef, rice and onion), taco soup (ground beef, onion, chili beans, kidney beans, corn, tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, green chile peppers and taco seasoning mix) and boxed wine (sure, you could cut back, the wine site says, but "that smacks of desperation.")

"People want to make the most of every last bit of their ingredients," said Esmee Williams, the site's vice president of marketing.

Requests for ways to prepare pricier offerings, such as steak and salmon, also jumped significantly, indicating that people who want to enjoy finer cuts of meat or fish are looking for new ways to cook them up at home.

Ethnic food recipes are also in demand. "The search for Chinese recipes swelled 200% from January through March from the prior three-month period," Williams said, "and nearly twice as many people went hunting for Indian dishes."

"For us, that was evidence that people were trying to re-create restaurant experiences at home," she said.

Prep your pickles
Food cost fallout
May 14, 2008
This is sort of like reading tea leaves, but Allrecipes.com, the online "cooking community," reports that its numbers suggest that Americans are looking for lower-cost recipes. Traffic to recipe pages that use economical ground beef and pasta have almost doubled since the beginning of the year, while searches for such low-cost recipes increased by 74 percent.

Video: Cutting the Grocery Bill
April 25, 2008
For more tips on saving money at the grocery store, you can watch my discussion with Good Morning LA's Jean Martirez here. As I've mentioned, one of my favorite ideas is to use ingredients that are already at home. Martirez wanted to know what she could do with ketchup, garlic, and some old cheese. Luckily, we have allrecipes.com and foodnetwork.com to help us with that one. Allrecipes.com suggests baked spaghetti.

Belt-Tightening, Web Style
April 23, 2008
Now serving: tilapia, ground beef and rice-potatoes-bread.

That's not a new flavor combo; those ingredients are among the most popular in online recipe search terms by the 7 million unique visitors each month to Allrecipes.com, a food-based social networking Web site with more than 40,000 recipes submitted by home cooks.

Allrecipes.com's marketing vice president, Esmee Williams, says the Seattle-based company began tracking certain low-cost ingredients in January, as consumers were faced with higher food prices. After the data were adjusted to remove regular increases in site traffic and comparisons were drawn against the first three months of 2007, Allrecipes.com found:

• There were increases in recipe searches for rice (90 percent), potatoes (110 percent) and bread (99 percent).
• Searches for ground beef recipes increased 117 percent, while searches for recipes that featured steak increased 83 percent.
• Casserole searches were up 30 percent.
• Searches for tilapia recipes increased at a much higher rate than searches for salmon recipes, although the three-month total for salmon searches this year was 455,214 vs. 229,724 for tilapia searches.
• Page views for "make at home" versions of restaurant pizza and Chinese and Indian food increased 79 percent over the same three months last year.

6 Ways to Eat Better for Less
April 16, 2008
(Excerpt) At the popular cooking website Allrecipes.com, visitors want to know one thing: How can they cook for less?

"People are moving away from steak and using ground beef. They're moving away from salmon and looking to tilapia, a cheaper fish," says Esmee Williams, vice president of marketing for Allrecipes.com. "Recipes for less-expensive dishes, such as casseroles and chili, have also surged in popularity," she says.

Those cooking trends reflect the fact that food prices are rising faster than a cheese soufflé. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports an almost 5 percent annual growth rate for food eaten at home, with certain items, such as cereals, up over 9 percent. But cooking experts say that with the right ingredients and recipes, affordable (and tasty) meals are just a grocery list away. They offer these six tips:

Plan ahead. Shopping with specific meals in mind for the week ahead makes it easer to buy in bulk and repurpose ingredients, turning Sunday night's roast chicken into Monday night's enchiladas, Williams says. "A lot of folks get in trouble when they don't plan ahead. The day takes longer than expected, and they're ordering out or reaching for ready-made meals, and those are very expensive," she says. "The more you can cook from scratch, the further your dollar can stretch."

Consumers Downsizing Meals
April 15, 2008
THE ECONOMIC DOWNTURN is already causing Americans to cut back on spending, according to data from Allrecipes, an online cooking community with more than 35 million unique visitors annually.

Here are some of the findings that Allrecipes shared with PROGRESSIVE GROVER for the 75th Annual Report of the Grocery Industry. The data was released in March.

• Traffic to traditionally low-cost ingredients, such as ground beef, pasta, and quick and easy recipes has increased. These channels have almost doubled (increased by 50 percent) over the past three months.
• Ground beef: +117 percent
• Pasta: +83 percent
• Quick and easy: +88 percent
• Page views in the collections that house “make-at-home” versions of popular restaurant dishes such as pizza, Chinese, and Indian-style have increased.
• Traffic to the pizza, Chinese, and Indian hubs has increased 79 percent over the past three months.
• Searches for low-cost vs. their high-cost counterparts have increased significantly, 74 percent overall.
• Ground beef (+107 percent) vs. steak (+83 percent): Ground beef had a relative increase of 24 percent when compared with steak.
• Tilapia (+188 percent) vs. salmon (+105 percent): Tilapia has increased 84 percent when compared with salmon.
• Searches for inexpensive cuts of meat have increased significantly
• Meatloaf: 85 percent
• Casseroles: 50 percent
• Pot roast: 24 percent
• Chili: 24 percent

Allrecipes has also witnessed increased traffic to several of its cost-cutting meal idea pages, including Budgeting Tips, Great Meal Ideas for Under $10, and Basic Pantry Items than Produce 20 Great Meals.

Consumers Spending More on Groceries This Year: Survey
May 29, 2008
SEATTLE — Sixty percent of respondents to a recent online survey conducted by Allrecipes here reported they were spending more on groceries than one year ago. In addition, the survey revealed that 54% were more mindful of grocery prices; 32% were preparing more meals at home; and 22% were buying more store brands. The survey tapped 750 Allrecipes.com households where 90% of the respondents identified themselves as their family’s primary grocery buyer. A third-party research group independently analyzed the data.

Hard-Pressed Consumers Eating In More Often
Spam sales rise; so do store brands
May 29, 2008
High gas prices and an ailing economy are driving consumers to the grocery store instead of their favorite restaurant, a survey finds. Perhaps even more telling, Spam sales are up, Hormel reports.

Sixty percent of respondents to an online survey conducted by Allrecipes reported they were spending more on groceries than one year ago.

In addition, the survey revealed that 54% were more mindful of grocery prices; 32% were preparing more meals at home; and 22% were buying more store brands. The survey tapped 750 Allrecipes.com households where 90% of the respondents identified themselves as their family’s primary grocery buyer. A third-party research group independently analyzed the data.

How do you feel about your groceries? Here's the skinny
May 23, 2008
The results are in on Americans and their tangled relationships with their groceries. First, according to the Consumer Reports offshoot Shop Smart, we tend to waste the things that are meant to help us not waste food. American women spend about $100 on disposable food storage and wrapping items per year (we can assume men spend a fraction of that)—plastic being the preferred material. About half get thrown away rather than recycled.

We trust the grocery store more this year than last: the Food Marketing Institute’s 2008 Grocery Shopper Trends report says our confidence in grocery store food safety has gone up to 80 percent (last year it was at an 18-year low 66 percent); also: male baby boomers, the rich, and the young (25 to 39 year olds) are more concerned about the quality of their diet than others; more than half of us wish our grocery stores sold reusable shopping bags and will buy locally grown products if they’re available; and 77 percent of us are not comfortable with the idea of eating a cloned animal product.

Finally, from Allrecipes.com’s online survey conducted this spring: 60 percent of us are spending more groceries than we did a year ago, 54 percent are more mindful of grocery prices; 32 percent are preparing more meals at home and 22 percent are buying store brands. Any questions?

Web feast of frugal meals
As food prices climb, sites offering low-cost recipes boom.
May 20, 2008
Here's an upside to soaring food prices: big gains for certain websites.

At www.allrecipes.com, traffic to low-budget and quick-and-easy recipes has nearly doubled over the last three months. www.thriftyfun.com recorded more than 4 million page views in March, almost twice the number than in the same month last year. And www.hillbillyhousewife.com, not known for recipes involving truffle oil or sauteed chanterelles, has more visitors too. ...

Allrecipes.com began tracking interest in ground beef and pasta in January, and it has since risen 107% and 74%, respectively. Visits have also increased to the "10 Meals on $10" pages. The website's articles sing the praises of porcupines (balls of ground beef, rice and onion), taco soup (ground beef, onion, chili beans, kidney beans, corn, tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, green chile peppers and taco seasoning mix) and boxed wine (sure, you could cut back, the wine site says, but “that smacks of desperation.”)

“People want to make the most of every last bit of their ingredients,” said Esmee Williams, the site's vice president of marketing.

Requests for ways to prepare pricier offerings, such as steak and salmon, also jumped significantly, indicating that people who want to enjoy finer cuts of meat or fish are looking for new ways to cook them up at home.

Ethnic food recipes are also in demand. “The search for Chinese recipes swelled 200% from January through March from the prior three-month period,” Williams said, “and nearly twice as many people went hunting for Indian dishes.”

“For us, that was evidence that people were trying to re-create restaurant experiences at home,” she said.

Prep your pickles
Food cost fallout
May 14, 2008
This is sort of like reading tea leaves, but Allrecipes.com, the online “cooking community,” reports that its numbers suggest that Americans are looking for lower-cost recipes. Traffic to recipe pages that use economical ground beef and pasta have almost doubled since the beginning of the year, while searches for such low-cost recipes increased by 74 percent.

Video: Cutting the Grocery Bill
April 25, 2008
For more tips on saving money at the grocery store, you can watch my discussion with Good Morning LA's Jean Martirez here. As I've mentioned, one of my favorite ideas is to use ingredients that are already at home. Martirez wanted to know what she could do with ketchup, garlic, and some old cheese. Luckily, we have allrecipes.com and foodnetwork.com to help us with that one. Allrecipes.com suggests baked spaghetti.

Belt-Tightening, Web Style
April 23, 2008
Now serving: tilapia, ground beef and rice-potatoes-bread.

That's not a new flavor combo; those ingredients are among the most popular in online recipe search terms by the 7 million unique visitors each month to Allrecipes.com, a food-based social networking Web site with more than 40,000 recipes submitted by home cooks.

Allrecipes.com's marketing vice president, Esmee Williams, says the Seattle-based company began tracking certain low-cost ingredients in January, as consumers were faced with higher food prices. After the data were adjusted to remove regular increases in site traffic and comparisons were drawn against the first three months of 2007, Allrecipes.com found:

• There were increases in recipe searches for rice (90 percent), potatoes (110 percent) and bread (99 percent).
• Searches for ground beef recipes increased 117 percent, while searches for recipes that featured steak increased 83 percent.
• Casserole searches were up 30 percent.
• Searches for tilapia recipes increased at a much higher rate than searches for salmon recipes, although the three-month total for salmon searches this year was 455,214 vs. 229,724 for tilapia searches.
• Page views for “make at home” versions of restaurant pizza and Chinese and Indian food increased 79 percent over the same three months last year.

6 Ways to Eat Better for Less
April 16, 2008
(Excerpt) At the popular cooking website Allrecipes.com, visitors want to know one thing: How can they cook for less?

“People are moving away from steak and using ground beef. They're moving away from salmon and looking to tilapia, a cheaper fish,” says Esmee Williams, vice president of marketing for Allrecipes.com. “Recipes for less-expensive dishes, such as casseroles and chili, have also surged in popularity,” she says.

Those cooking trends reflect the fact that food prices are rising faster than a cheese soufflé. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports an almost 5 percent annual growth rate for food eaten at home, with certain items, such as cereals, up over 9 percent. But cooking experts say that with the right ingredients and recipes, affordable (and tasty) meals are just a grocery list away. They offer these six tips:

Plan ahead. Shopping with specific meals in mind for the week ahead makes it easer to buy in bulk and repurpose ingredients, turning Sunday night's roast chicken into Monday night's enchiladas, Williams says. “A lot of folks get in trouble when they don't plan ahead. The day takes longer than expected, and they're ordering out or reaching for ready-made meals, and those are very expensive,” she says. “The more you can cook from scratch, the further your dollar can stretch.”

Consumers Downsizing Meals
April 15, 2008
THE ECONOMIC DOWNTURN is already causing Americans to cut back on spending, according to data from Allrecipes, an online cooking community with more than 35 million unique visitors annually.

Here are some of the findings that Allrecipes shared with PROGRESSIVE GROVER for the 75th Annual Report of the Grocery Industry. The data was released in March.

• Traffic to traditionally low-cost ingredients, such as ground beef, pasta, and quick and easy recipes has increased. These channels have almost doubled (increased by 50 percent) over the past three months.
• Ground beef: +117 percent
• Pasta: +83 percent
• Quick and easy: +88 percent
• Page views in the collections that house “make-at-home” versions of popular restaurant dishes such as pizza, Chinese, and Indian-style have increased.
• Traffic to the pizza, Chinese, and Indian hubs has increased 79 percent over the past three months.
• Searches for low-cost vs. their high-cost counterparts have increased significantly, 74 percent overall.
• Ground beef (+107 percent) vs. steak (+83 percent): Ground beef had a relative increase of 24 percent when compared with steak.
• Tilapia (+188 percent) vs. salmon (+105 percent): Tilapia has increased 84 percent when compared with salmon.
• Searches for inexpensive cuts of meat have increased significantly
• Meatloaf: 85 percent
• Casseroles: 50 percent
• Pot roast: 24 percent
• Chili: 24 percent

Allrecipes has also witnessed increased traffic to several of its cost-cutting meal idea pages, including Budgeting Tips, Great Meal Ideas for Under $10, and Basic Pantry Items than Produce 20 Great Meals.

At-Home Eaters Seek More Inexpensive Recipes
March 28, 2008
SEATTLE — Searches for recipes using inexpensive ingredients increased by 91% on Allrecipes.com over the past three months, according to the Website’s latest Monthly Measuring Cup report. "With an unstable economic landscape, users have been consciously seeking more pocketbook-friendly recipes," according to the report. Ground beef, pasta and rice are among the least-expensive but most-used ingredients. Searches for make-at-home versions of popular ethnic restaurant dishes have also spiked. Searches for recipes involving Chinese fare have increased 200%, while searches for Indian recipes rose 93%. Allrecipes receives more than 35 million annual visits from users, who share and download recipes, reviews, personal profiles and meal ideas at the site.

Local techies stew up a slew of cooking & dining sites
March 19, 2008
If anyone had doubts about trying the almond-crusted halibut featured last week by Allrecipes.com, there were 216 reviews from home cooks -- people like GuyChef from Milwaukee and PregoCook in Saudi Arabia -- explaining how the five-star recipe had worked for them.

Other food lovers might have turned to Urbanspoon.com to find the most popular new restaurants in Atlanta, or to research what restaurants friends would recommend near their favorite spot in Denver, or to map an after-dark view of restaurants in Orlando, or Few users of these food and restaurant sites would realize it, or possibly even care, but all are based in the Seattle area. In fact, two of the top 10 food sites are here (Allrecipes is No. 2, second only to FoodNetwork.com, and Recipezaar is No. 8), and the area has a it to Scripps Networks in 2007. (Allrecipes was acquired by Reader's Digest in 2006.)…

As the home of Microsoft and Amazon, the Seattle area attracts enough programmers and Web-savvy entrepreneurs to make it a logical spot to launch any kind of Web site. Still, the Silicon Valley, New York, Boston or Austin, Texas, could say the same, and none has a similar food-loving online focus…

"It's really a city that is very open to new food ideas," said Esmee Williams, vice president of integrated sales and marketing at Allrecipes, who joined in the early days after working at a local company that specialized in cooking-related CD-ROMs. "We like to eat!" said Syd Carter of Allrecipes, another early employee and currently senior director of site operations. "It's not like the tech areas in California where no one wants to eat."…

Allrecipes got its humble start as cookierecipe.com, a recipe-swapping community founded by UW grad students. They weren't chefs -- their majors were more along the lines of archaeology and anthropology -- but they realized the value of a user-generated online community, a virtual backyard fence for home cooks rather than a slick site targeting gourmands. Their UW classes taught them some of the necessary practical skills, and they started finding work in online ventures. They swiftly moved beyond cookie recipes when they saw how many people found the site and began searching for ingredients like chicken.

It helped, said early employee Kala Krushnick, director of production and quality assurance, that co-founder Tim Hunt's wife was an avid cook who kept finding mistakes in the recipes being traded in chat rooms at the time. Where Allrecipes made its mark was in having professionals review recipes that readers submitted -- they're vetted to make sure they're not lifted from other sources, don't duplicate recipes already on the site and aren't missing ingredients or measurements.

Even as an industry leader, Seattle still matters to Allrecipes, Williams said. When the company was sold to Reader's Digest, it wasn't because Reader's Digest was the highest bidder. (It wasn't, she said.) It was that the company pledged to keep the team intact -- and to keep it here.

Cooks reach across digital realm to find and share new dishes
February 20, 2008
(Excerpt) Recipes were long a family affair. Mothers would pass down to daughters well-thumbed cookbooks, dog-eared file cards scribbled with faded ink, yellowed newspaper clippings and magazine columns folded just-so to fit snug in a squat wooden box.

Today, recipes are still about family, but the definition of family and the form of the recipe have broadened dramatically. Daughters, sons and thousands, if not millions, of strangers are brought together by two things: a computer mouse and a hunger for something good to eat.

Recipes have moved from paper to computer screen, allowing anyone anywhere to search and discover dishes from around the world…

Something, somewhere is bound to click.

The numbers can be staggering. Some 17 million visits to Allrecipes.com were recorded over the first 28 days of January. The site gets 175 million page visits annually, representing a year-to-year increase of 32 percent, and Allrecipes.com boasts some 35 million unique visitors yearly.

Visits to recipe Web sites are up 21 percent from January 2007 to January 2008, according to statistics from Hitwise, the Internet measurement company based in New York. Hitwise counts 633 recipe Web sites, but Heather Dougherty, company director of research, cautioned that the actual number may be higher because there are so many food blogs out there. She said 61 percent of the traffic to recipe sites is female and these visitors are more mature; 33 percent are 55 or older.