Creating a community cookbook

NEA Today, Oct 2002 by Loschert, Kristen

David Quinn definitely knows what's cooking. In fact, he probably gave you the recipe.

Quinn, a high school English teacher from Seattle, Washington, oversees the Internet's number one food website, allrecipes.com. Quinn's site offers more than 20,000 recipes for novice cooks and gourmet chefs alike. The site also includes nutritional information, meal plans, coupons, and cooking tutorials. With more than 3 million unique visitors each month, allrecipes.com sees more traffic than sites for Martha Stewart and the Food Network.

"We're a community cookbook," Quinn says. Quinn's food empire started in 1997 with a single website, cookierecipe.com, which he and his partners designed so their wives could trade cookie recipes. That site won Yahoo's site of the day and site of the month awards. The Seattle Times named cookierecipe.com the best free website of 1997.

Visitors to the site also wanted to exchange recipes for other treats. Quinn and his associates responded with cakerecipe.com, pierecipe.com, and breadrecipe.com. In 1998, the group merged all of the sites into allrecipes.com.

"We just listened to the users," Quinn says. "We weren't thinking `let's make lots of money,' We were thinking 'let's build this really cool product.'"

Allrecipes.com now includes recipes for appetizers, soups, and entrees, as well as desserts. Users also can link to recipes developed by the company's partners, including Kraft, Hershey's, and Betty Crocker.

-Kristen Loschert