Foodista Raises $550,000 From Amazon And Other Angels

Amazon is now an angel investor in a company led by one of its former employees. Foodista, which is trying to create an authoritative wiki for recipes, raised a $550,000 series A funding from Amazon and a group of local Seattle angel investors. CEO and founder Barnaby Dorfman was formerly a vice president at Amazon’s A9 search engine, before he left in 2006.

Foodista is targeting the growing ranks of food bloggers to contribute recipes and use Foodista as a marketing vehicle to find new readers. To that end it has organized the first International Food Blogger Conference in Seattle in May, which is already sold out (Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl is keynoting).

As I described Foodista in my initial review:

It is a Wikipedia for food. Each recipe can be collaboratively edited and improved. Scrumptious photos for each dish are pulled in from Flickr, and descriptions are pulled in from Wikipedia itself. You can add or remove ingredients, see the edit history, or add a comment to each page.

The site is built entirely on Amazon Web services (EC2, S3, and Simple DB) and every ingredient, recipe, technique, and cooking appliance is treated as structured data that links to every other mention of that same item on the site, which makes exploring a lot easier. The site’s traffic still barely registers on many measurement services, but is showing some traction.