The weird thing about food blogging is that – well, how can we put this – they are still blogging. While millions of you seem happy to Instagram your food, there really are still people out there blogging the crap out of restaurants, cafes and bars. Anyone would think eating was a necessity people actually enjoyed… So it comes as a surprise to note there are dearth of products available to aid this horde of foodies. Is there anything out there to allow for bloggers work up a traditional recipe format based on a simple written WordPress post, for instance? Well, until now there wasn’t. But today there is. Kitchenbug does it and it goes live today as an actual startup.
Kitchenbug is a startup which is part of the Microsoft Israel Accelerator for Windows Azure, based out of Tel Aviv. It’s product is a WordPress plugin which acts like a recipe helper which uses Natural Language Processing allowing blogs to include recipes and interactive nutritional information without the writer needing to do manual calculations or searches for ingredients. It reads the blogger’s plain text (like ‘1 cup of sugar’) analyzes the ingredients, and then puts in the recipe. Kitchenbug is also offered via API in a SaaS model.
What you end up with is an automatically formatted recipe which can be included in Google Recipe search results, raising its search visibility. It even adds statistics related to the recipe’s nutritional value such as amount of calories, fat, cholesterol, and carbs, and displays understandable terms like ‘high in saturated fat’.
What blog visitors get out of it is the ability to tweak the number of servings, switch between U.S. or Metric weights info pop-ups about the food.
Clearly this is low hanging fruit, as it were, for any site which covers recipes, giving the startup the ability to go pretty viral and scale up. No doubt there will be monetization opportunities along the way, especially if it gets some real scale across the web.