Key Ingredient - digital recipes. real cooks.

Our Vision

Sharing is the heart of cooking. Key Ingredient is the best place for cooks to preserve and share the recipes they love on the Internet.

Our Mission

To build a service that makes every recipe in a cook's collection more valuable and uniquely their own.

Member Services

Online Recipe Collections
Like personal photos, recipes reflect a unique aspect of the person who cooks from them. At a minimum, storing recipes online preserves them. Ask anyone who has lost their home what they miss most, and their recipe collection is often in the top 5 things. Your recipes on Key Ingredient can be preserved as a completely private collection, but opening some of your recipes to friends and family, or even to the public, increases their value exponentially. We believe that sharing your recipes is a wonderful act of generosity and of self-expression. We also believe that recipes in digital form are the ultimate "social object". Recipes create the basis for an identity in a community of people who love to cook. And they lead to new discoveries: if you like a recipe in a cook's collection, it's quite possible that they will like some of yours. As you save recipes on Key Ingredient, your collection acts as a filter for all of the recipe content on the Internet. Friends and other cooks can rely on your collection as a trusted, tested resource. Recipes spread, take on a life of their own and serve as the connection between people. As you modify and tweak recipes to your personal taste, your collection will become even more valuable to you and the people you share them with. After all, people are the best search engines on Earth, and Key Ingredient brings people together to collect, preserve, find, create and share their recipes in as many ways as we can think of.

On-demand Cookbook Publishing
Recipes stored on Key Ingredient can be published as a printed cookbook in just three simple steps: first, select the recipes for your cookbook and sort them into optional sections like Appetizers, Soups, Entrees, Desserts (think Gmail folders and you're on the right track); next, enter a title for the cookbook and upload a photo for the cover; then preview the book. That's it. This ground-breaking web-based publishing application leverages a wide array of open-source technologies to create professional quality books with push-button simplicity. Each perfect-bound cookbook includes a gloss-coated color cover, table of contents and recipes formatted for easy reading. Starting at less than $10, these cookbooks are the perfect gift for family and friends. Publishing is an integral part of our mission to make every recipe in a cook's collection more valuable and uniquely their own.

Community
Unlike virtually any other major recipe website, Key Ingredient is exclusively focused on recipes that are directly owned and controlled by the cooks who post them. Most recipe websites are oriented toward Search, so for them, one ultimate brownie is enough. We look at things differently. Recipes are a reflection of the cook who shares them. Sharing recipes and the cooks themselves are the key ingredient in a recipe community. Finding recipes through friends and like-minded cooks forms the foundation of Key Ingredient. And it goes beyond that. Cooks have interests that lead to forming groups, and Key Ingredient has a facility dedicated to Groups: collections of cooks who can share message posts and recipes surrounding a special interest or need (e.g. Sugarfreedom, Burgermeisters, The Quahog Club). These Key Ingredient Groups are specially designed to be recipe-centric and feature a group cookbook, that can be public or private, as an integral part of each community.

Scan My Recipes
The more we spoke to people about their recipe collections, the more recipe boxes we saw. It turns out that millions of cooks have their recipes stored on food-stained cards, clippings, print-outs, copies, and mostly in handwritten notes. The universal theme we found: "if you could take this box and turn it into that cookbook...now that would be something!" Scan My Recipes is designed to do just that. Most of the collections we found ranged from the dozens to the hundreds of recipes, and it was a "to-do" item in every case to organize and save the recipe collection someday. But the truth is that takes a lot of time to transcribe recipes. Yet there are technologies and services that are specifically designed for transcribing radio, TV, written records and the like every day. Scan My Recipes builds a bridge between consumers and these specialized services. Once transcribed, recipes can be viewed on Key Ingredient in a private account and they are preserved on an archive CD-Rom. And at 39 cents per recipe, it certainly makes it easy to justify scanning all of your recipes for archive and peace-of-mind, onto the Internet and into your own cookbook.

Syndication Services

White Label Customers
Key Ingredient is a pioneer in the syndication of recipe content for portals, media sites and major brands to engage their audiences and customers to find, create, share and collect recipes. Providing the technologies for content generation and syndication, Key Ingredient helps white labels customers leverage user-generated content to build pageviews, drive revenue, retain users and build repeat visits to their sites with topical recipe content.

Bloggers and Publishers
Key Ingredient offers unique tools to structure text-based recipes into dynamic "microcontent" with our Flash-based widget. Recipes in our widget can be controlled via a suite of permissions, syndicated to a wider audience, tracked with a suite of analytics, enriched with FDA nutritional estimates, and monetized with rich media advertising opportunities. In addition, each recipe is branded with a graphical header that provides a permanent link back to the site or blog where the recipe was initially published, building blog and site traffic with new visibility and reach.