San Francisco: Yahoo Inc is going into the food business.
The Sunnyvale, California-based company said on Wednesday it was offering Yahoo users thousands of recipes, advice from regional celebrity chefs, video cooking guides and easy-to-use Web tools to help cooks answer the daily question: What's for dinner?
The Web media giant is looking to create a new lifestyle business in a category that, while well established in Internet terms, is largely fragmented among food industry players and niche recipe sites, with few big independent media players.
Yahoo Food (http://food.yahoo.com) will be served up to the US market initially.
Early in 2007, it aims to move into other English-speaking countries like Australia, Britain and Canada, then expand into other global markets, officials said.
Among Web users, the US food reference category is dominated by cable television's Food Network, suppliers such as Kraft Foods, BettyCrocker.com and Williams-Sonoma and specialist cook sites including Cooks.com and Epicurious, according to US data from audience measurement firm Hitwise Inc.
Other than the Food Network, independent media companies are not big players online. AOL Food is active but has a tiny market share, according to Hitwise.
Gadget review company Cnet Networks Inc. recently relaunched Chow.com.
“This is very much of an extension of Yahoo's media business.” general manager of Yahoo Lifestyles, Deanna Brown said in an interview.
“It's a very compelling experience for Yahoo advertisers,” she added.
Yahoo offers a searchable recipe database, personalized features that remind Yahoo users of their prior searches for recipes or articles on the site, and a potentially vast social network of people united by common interests around food.
Search underpins the workings of the site. The technology indexes thousands of recipes via a partnership with allrecipes.com. Users can search by ingredient, cuisine, foods for special.
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