Yummly, a veteran of the recipe discovery space — founded back in 2009, and backed by Physic Ventures, Unilever Corporate Ventures and others to the tune of $7.85 million — is kicking off its first international expansion by launching into the U.K, describing the move as the “first step” in its plan to create a “globally accessible platform for recipes, food and taste”.
The food-finding service aggregates hundreds of thousands of recipes from around the web and lets users slice and dice that data in a variety of ways to find appropriate dishes.
In its home market of the U.S. Yummly has built up a monthly active user-base in excess of 15 million. That’s a sizeable increase on the four million monthly visitors it was reporting nearly two years ago, as of March 2012. But it’s clearly hoping to grow that further by expanding into new markets overseas.
In its first foreign foray, it’s launched a U.K. specific website, Yummly.co.uk, along with a locally flavoured iOS app.
Language similarities and the ease of converting measurements were factors that played a role in Yummly choosing the U.K. as its first international market, the company said in a release.
Its British localization efforts extend to including local recipe sources, imperial units of measure, and skewing recipe suggestions to better mesh with U.K. users’ (apparent) affinity for spicy foods and group dinners on weekends. (As a Brit, I can confirm our penchant for curries.)
It has also added new browse categories and tweaked its search filters to offer such culturally specific staples as “Sunday Lunch” and “Mexican”.
U.K. Yummly users can access more than one million unique and U.K.-specific recipes which can be filtered by nutrition, season and taste preference. Recipes are sourced from “top food sites”, “niche blogs”, and also from local food brands such as Knorr and Bertolli.
Yummly.co.uk is also being served U.K.-specific ads. While the company said it optimised its iOS app due to the U.K.’s high mobile penetration.
Along with Physic and Unilever Ventures, Yummly’s other existing backers include First Round Capital, Harrison Metal Capital, and Intel Capital. Its founding angel investors and advisory board include: Jeff Jordan (partner at Andreessen Horowitz), Bill Cobb (CEO, H&R Block), Justin LaFrance (StumbleUpon), Marcia Hooper and Brad O’Neill (CEO, TechValidate).