iPhone Recipe Apps Surge

By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 1/20/2009 9:00:00 AM

Allrecipes.com recently introduced a new initiative that will be a boon to its users—and demonstrates yet another way publishers can make their content available using new technologies. The Dinner Spinner is an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that allows users to search content from Allrecipes, access cooking instructions, see photos, and get ratings and reviews. The application is similar to Urbanspoon, a popular app that lets users find local restaurants, showing options in a slot-machine style that mixes and resets when users shake their iPhone up and down. The Dinner Spinner offers iPhone users thousands of recipes and is free.

Allrecipes based its recipe selection on the search behaviors, ratings and reviews of the site’s 10 million monthly visitors. Once a user downloads the app, recipes can be located by selecting a main ingredient, dish type and cook time to see matching recipes. Undecided cooks can shake their iPhone to activate the Dinner Spinner’s slot-machine-style action for “surprise” dish ideas. The app is getting mainly positive reviews, although a common complaint is the lack of search bar.

The Dinner Spinner isn’t the first iPhone app from an online cooking community. Last month, BigOven.com celebrated the one millionth download of its BigOven iPhone App, which landed on Apple’s list of the Top 100 Free Apps of 2008. A recent story in Tech Flash, Seattle’s online technology magazine, cited four reasons for the BigOven app’s success. Publishers who want to make their recipes available via an iPhone app, take note:

1. Massive addressable audience: who might use a recipe app? Anyone who uses the Internet and cooks (or wants to).

2. Natural fit with mobility: BigOven founder Steve Murch said, “Have you ever been at a grocery store and wondered if you’ve got everything for that dinner you wanted to prepare? Or been stuck for what to make? Or wondered how to best identify a ripe avocado?”

3. Natural fit with the iPhone target audience: iPhones are much more consumer-friendly than other devices. And the people who use them tend to run their households—and are in charge of dinner.

4. Best in category and free: The BigOven App has more recipes than any other cooking app in the iTunes store.