Type of site Recipe Owner Meredith Corporation Alexa rank 550 (February 2014) | Available in Multilingual (13) Website allrecipes.com Commercial Yes | |
Allrecipes.com, Inc. is a food focused online social networking service headquartered in Seattle, Washington. The company, which was founded by David Quinn, Carl Lipo, Mark Madsen, Michael Pfeffer, Dan Shepherd and Tim Hunt in 1997, is today owned by the Meredith Corporation. The company currently operates 19 websites in 13 languages.
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History
Allrecipes.com was founded in 1997 after co-founder Hunt had trouble finding his favorite cookie recipe on the Internet. The recipe sharing and cooking community website began as an offshoot of one of Seattle's first web companies, Emergent Media. The company's original website was CookieRecipe.com. After Cookierecipe came Cakerecipe.com, Chickenrecipe.com, Pierecipe.com, Beefrecipe.com. After launching 38 different domains, the company consolidated all its websites into Allrecipes.com.
In 1999 Allrecipes.com hired Bill Moore, a former Starbucks executive, as its CEO. In 2006 Reader's Digest purchased of Allrecipes.com for $66 million. At the time Reader's Digest felt that the acquisition would provide it with a valuable digital platform that would enable it to bring together various Reader's Digest activities using a common software platform.
Reader's Digest sold the company to the Meredith in 2012 for $175 million.
Website
The recipes on the website are posted by members of the Allrecipes.com community. They are categorized by season, type of course (such as appetizer or dessert), and ingredients. Search functionality supports requiring and excluding specific ingredients. Other categories include methods (such as grilling or baking), occasions, and cooking style. There is support for finding meal ideas for specific holidays.
Allrecipes.com is available for iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone, and Android users. Allrecipes.com's apps for smartphones allow users to access the site and its user-uploaded content while on the go. In 2011 Alison Sherwood of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel rated the site as one of her "five favorite food apps." The app allows users to search recipes and include specifications in their search (such as type of meal, nutrition, key ingredients, and time needed to prepare the dish). Recipes can be saved and easily shared on Twitter and Facebook.
In September 2015 Allrecipies.com launched a revamped website as part of a broader transformation into a social networking service for food lovers. The September 2015 website relaunch was met with broad criticism with the most common grievance being the perceived decrease in usability.