Recipe Websites Get Fat in Lean Times

In tough economic times, consumers are standing the heat by getting into the kitchen. According to comScore, food sites attracted 45.6 million unique visitors in September 2008, up 10% from 2007—more than double the rate of total Internet growth in the US.

Allrecipes.com led the pack with over 8 million unique visitors in October 2008. The site has had increased traffic since early 2008 and plans to maintain its lead with features and content that cater to consumers with tight budgets and schedules.

Allrecipes.com has grown to include 296,000 recipes from millions of users who run the gamut from foodies to beginning cooks to time-strapped moms. Site users can search across all the recipes, articles and editorial content by dish or by ingredient. Each month, Allrecipes staff review top searches and solicit recipes from the community to fulfill user needs, which they cull from polls and surveys.

When the economy began to falter earlier in 2008, metrics showed a jump in the number of site visitors and recipe searches, as well as a trend in the types of ingredients being searched.

"We saw an 8% increase in searches for lower-priced ingredients like ground beef and less-expensive cuts of meat," Lisa Sharples, president of Allrecipes.com, told eMarketer.

"We also noticed that more people overall were searching the site by ingredients instead of by recipe," she added. "Rather than searching a recipe and then buying those ingredients, users are buying ingredients that are on sale and then finding a recipe that uses them."

The site responded to this trend by launching a budget cooking section, a collection of articles, videos and money-saving tips written by the editorial staff. Users are invited to submit wallet-friendly recipes that can be added to the recipe database and linked. Staffers review user-submitted recipes for relevance to the growing need for affordable cooking options.

Recipes are a steady draw for Internet users in the US. Among US Internet users who visited blogs, online communities or social networks in August 2008, 22% said they went there to share recipes or book reviews, according to a survey by MarketTools.