Edamam - A Food Knowledge Platform - Community Education Series

Hi, I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and tonight we're here for our community education series, and we have a special guest here tonight with Edamame, and I'm going to introduce you to their representatives. Representatives, we have Yanko and Stephanie here from their company, and they're going to talk about Edamame and the plugin and how to use it and what it can do for us as food bloggers. Alright, so guys, take it away.

Hello everybody, and thank you for joining us. We're really thrilled to have this opportunity to connect with your community. To start off the presentation, I am going to talk to you about who we are at A Mom Company, what we do, and how we partner with bloggers. And following that, Ianko is going to give a live demo of the WordPress plugin that we are really excited to share with your community. So I'm going to flip over now to our presentation and get started. Alright, so our mission at Edamame is to help people eat better. So to begin, I'm going to speak to you about how the end user experiences that mission, how we deliver that mission, and that's through a recipe finder. The recipe finder is available on our website at edamom.com. We also share recipes across social media platforms: Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and we also run contests frequently on those platforms as well to share recipes. And as well, we have a mobile app available on iPhone, on the iPad, and on Android devices that as well have the recipe finder available. So I'm going to talk to you a little bit more about the mobile app, which in this day and age is really important. The mobile app is optimized for mobile usage, easy to browse and compare on the go, So our target customer, our majority of our customers are moms who are using their mobile app, let's say in the shopping store, and they're, you know, running through the aisles, they've got their children in the carts and they see a beautiful head of lettuce and they think, oh, how can I make this tonight and, you know, be able to satisfy my kids' dietary requirements. So what they would do would use the search ingredient to— search box to search by ingredient. They can check off any dietary requirements using our filters, and what will show up are the best recipes in the database that match those requirements. So this cuts decision-making by 10 times. We found in our marketing research that it takes people 3 to 4 hours to find a recipe that they're satisfied with using Google search alone. And again, as I mentioned, this mobile app has the ability to filter results by any health or dietary requirements. And what's also interesting is that each recipe on the mobile app, on our website, anything in our database shows a full nutritional profile. Um, so we really like to share knowledge and empower our users with this food knowledge. Now I'm going to talk to you about how we carry the Edamame Mission out with bloggers, how we partner with bloggers to help us carry this mission out, and how they can benefit as well. There are 3 tools, 3 top tools that we're going to talk about tonight. One involves marketing features that we do on our Fresh Picks series. Another is about monetization, a way that we're looking to change the online food arena. And the third is content management, which is the plugin that I think you all have, have, you know, heard about on WordPress that we've developed. So let's get a little bit deeper here in marketing and our Fresh Picks feature. The Fresh Picks feature is something that we do with bloggers who have their recipes on our site. The Fresh Picks series goes out on not only our website but also to our mobile app. So it really allows bloggers the opportunity to have their recipes featured on a mobile device. And this series reaches over 325,000 mobile devices. It's also featured on the website and it's promoted too on social media. The recipes that we use, uh, for the feature are recipes that we select and, um, share that selection with bloggers beforehand, and we decide on a recipe to feature for 7 days, one recipe a day for one week on the series. Additionally, we try to get as creative as possible, and in conjunction with the feature, we also run contests and giveaways. One example is a contest that we did with Michael Rollman for Passover, and we gave away a copy of his Shmaltz app. Now we'll move into the monetization platform that we are developing. So our belief is that there are people willing to pay for quality recipe content. So the platform that we are creating, you can envision a type of iTunes for recipes or Netflix for recipes. It's a place where bloggers and chefs can upload their content to sell on the platform. And the content is going to be packaged in different ways, as individual recipes, as menus, as cookbooks, and as subscriptions as well. Each time that your recipe is sold, much like if you were an artist with your music on iTunes, you would be earning a revenue on your recipe sale. So we see this as really being much bigger and much more productive than the type of monetization you may be doing currently on your blog. Lastly, I'm going to talk about our content management tool, which is the WordPress SEO plugin. I'll talk to you briefly about our top 3 favorite features, and then I will pass it over to Ianko for a demo of the tool. So one thing that we have on the plugin is the ability to calculate nutritional information on each recipe that it's used with. Again, this is an option. If you don't prefer to have your nutritional profile on your recipes, that's absolutely fine, you can turn it off. But if you do, you know that you have a trusted source to provide that calculation for you. Additionally, the WordPress plugin drives traffic. It drives traffic to mobile devices, to our website, to social media platforms, because any recipe that's used with the plugin will automatically be in the Edamame database. Thirdly, it improves Google search rank. It uses the schema.org and the plugin that way is able to improve your rank on Google. So that finishes up my portion. I would really like you to consider reaching out to either myself or Ianka with any questions or about any inquiries, any interest that you might have. We really do appreciate all the partnerships that we have with bloggers, and I'd love to have a more detailed conversation with you. So here you have our contact, and now I'm going to pass it over to Iñigo.

Stephanie, before we start, we did have a question. Uh, Georgia Baker, Kim Watkinson wanted to know how they can get selected and/or bring a recipe to your attention, because you mentioned about that in the, uh, in your presentation.

Absolutely. So first you would have to have your recipes in our database, and that will happen by using the plugin. After that, it could be either me reaching out to you, or if you are interested in a feature, you reaching out to us. So I am really always working on, you know, being in touch with the bloggers who are on our site and creating these relationships and partnerships and reaching out with ways to collaborate. So on our end, we're very proactive, but if somebody has just gotten their recipes on their site, as long as they have, you know, enough recipes to choose from, there are 7 recipes that are chosen for the feature. Ideally, you know, we would like a minimum of 50 recipes, then you would be a perfect candidate for a feature.

Great, thank you.

Sure.

All right, Ianko, take it away.

Hey. Hey, thank you, Stephanie. Good evening, and thank you so much for joining us tonight. I'll show you the plugin. It will be a really short presentation because it takes about 45 seconds to a minute, really, to format a recipe with the plugin. Beforehand, I want just to add something to what Stephanie said, and this is about your recipes being included in our database. We always get this question, so I would rather answer it first. We do not include your entire recipe in our database. All we include is what you'll see if you go and see it on Edamam, which is the title, the image, the ingredients, and the nutritional information, which we calculate for your recipe automatically. If anybody wants to see the recipe, they will have to go to your blog. So we are really like Google for recipes. So we're not trying to host your content and take the traffic away from you. Actually, we do drive traffic to you. So now I'll get you into the plugin. It's really what we believe pretty neat too to format your recipes. And here is one recipe which is already formatted. You can see it actually. I use my blog for it, but it's really a recipe from Sunday Supper. You might know that blogger. She uses our plugin. What you see is the plugin which goes below the recipe. Our goal is really to not to break the way you write your recipes, but to help customers read them better. So you write your recipe the way you usually do. You include your images. You include your blog posting. At the very bottom of your recipe, you add the plugin. I'll show you shortly how. And the plugin is really a way to format the recipe cooking instructions and ingredients in an easy way for your readers to use. And there is a neat print feature as well, which I'll show later. So how can you really use that? And really, you have to just go and edit one of your recipes. So I'll click on that recipe. I already opened it here to avoid internet issues. And here is the recipe in an edit mode, as you usually see it in your admin interface in WordPress, and on the very bottom I already included the plugin, but the way it's really— it's included, there is this little E here. After you install the plugin, you just press it, it adds this box below the recipe, and this box is really what contains the formatted recipe for you. It automatically fills the title name based on the title of the recipe. You can add the link to an image. Actually, you have control for the size of the image. You can add a serving size. You can add time for the recipe. You just cut and paste the ingredients and the instructions. No need to format anything at all. We'll do all the formatting for you. You can choose from the different settings how it's formatted. Is it bullets? Is it ordered in any other way? Is it numbered? And so it's very easy for you to do. And there are more options. You can actually even add more bells and whistles to that. You can add summary, you can add rating, you can add prep and cook time, you can do all that. Really, if you already have the recipe created or you have it anywhere on Word or anything, just cut and paste. It takes about 45 seconds to a minute per recipe. And then you just click Update Recipe and the plugin will be included under the recipe. You can preview the changes. Using preview changes here, and you automatically see all what we've done for the recipe. Well, it usually takes some time with WordPress, but here is the recipe, and below it you will see the plugin once it loads. But, okay, so it takes some time. So here is the recipe already with the plugin below it. As you can see, we automatically calculated the calories, the fat, the carbs, the protein. There is this rating on the left side and all that information. This information is very useful besides for your customers, also for Google. We automatically calculate— include, actually, the schema.org formatting, which is required to be in your HTML, which is searched by Google, and which is then used by Google to surface your recipes in the Google search. So I'll show you— there is this Google tool, which is on Google Webmaster Tools, which will show how the recipe will look in the Google search results. So I just enter the URL of my blog. I click Preview on Google, and here you now see how Google will see your recipe in the search results. And as you can guess, that's very important for two reasons. First, you see all this information surfaced here. You see the image, which you need. You see the rating, which you include in the recipe. You see how many reviews it has. You see how long it takes to cook it. You see how many calories. Obviously, it makes it much more friendlier for the consumer, and obviously, it makes it much more likely for the consumer to click on it. Also, Google likes it and prefers— it doesn't necessarily increase your ranking in Google as far as search results go, but given equal ranking, Google will prefer generally recipe with more information. And that's what it does. It has also the print feature, which your customers can click and they can print the recipe.

Okay.

So all that says, there are 4 more— that's the ability to really easily format your recipes. Yep, go ahead.

I had a question. It was, you said we can copy and paste into it. Can we type everything directly into the plugin? So I mean, we can build our recipe in there like the one I use. I just type it in as I go.

Yes, and it will look just like that. I mean, if you have— of course, you can format in different ways. You can have border. You can change the background. You can format it in addition to the formatting of your blog. But yes, you can directly type the— it's just that most bloggers, I mean, kind of a big— you know, I mean, it's really different styles of blogging. Many bloggers prefer to write the kind of a blog post with more discussion of what happened, what led to this recipe, what the history is, and then includes in it the ingredients and includes the instructions. But sometimes it's easier to actually have all these things, the instructions, also in a separate little box, which helps readability for your— but it's up to you. It's really your blog. Also, what it obviously does, it includes the schema.org formatting in this. So even if you do only that, you have the schema.org formatting. OK. Forglue.

I just mentioned because the ones we use now, I mean, I just type the recipe format I use now. I just type into it. It doesn't have the nutritional information, but I just do my blog post. I write something, and then I put the recipe in, and then I just start building the recipe right in on my blog post in the format, in the plugin format. This works exactly the same way, right?

Absolutely. You can do that. OK. Good. Yep. You can do that as well. I mean, that's absolutely possible to do. And as I said, it's really formatting the Google optimization, the nutritional calculation, and the inclusion of the AdMob search network so that your recipe surfaces in more places and it drives traffic to you. So really, that's the plugin. It's very easy to use. And you can customize many things for it. I'll just show for a second what you can customize. You can turn off and on the logo, the nutritional info. You can change the recipe background, the image size, the border style. I mean, any normal things you would like to do and you normally do. When you format your recipes. So it's really customizable, it's really easy to use, and hopefully you'll find it fun to use. We also are actively developing it, so it's not sitting like nobody takes care of it, and we collect feedback. So we'll love to get your feedback, Chef Dennis Littley, and everybody else's of what you guys want to see, what were the most useful features you want to see into the next release. So that will be great as well. And you can finally find it, obviously, in the plugin section by simply searching for Add-a-Mom in the plugin section in the Add New Plugin section. That's about it. Any questions if anybody has any?

Yeah, we do have one. Mother Remini just wants to know, she's using another recipe plugin. And she wants to know if she does add this in, are there going to be any conflicts with her previous recipes, if she's using another plugin now?

No. I mean, unless you— I mean, obviously— yes, yes, yes, that's a great question, actually. If you use two plugins for the same recipe, you can certainly do so. No reason why not to. There will be no conflict. It's a self-contained plugin, so there is no problem. It doesn't break the rest of your formatting. That's exactly it. Entire goal of the plugin we do. But, and so it won't create any problems. If you have the plugin on a different recipe, it has nothing— it will not change anything for your old recipes with the old plugin. You can still stay with that. No, not a problem at all. You can always also select to use this plugin for some recipes, not for others. Oh, and I forgot to say, by the way, also for some recipes our plugin is way more useful because we actually supports the feature which allows you to format multiple-step recipes, which is something which other plugins don't do. So you can read the little instructions here, and in fact you can format in multi-step format so that they look great, and you can have different things for the sauce, different things for the dough, I mean, depending what you're cooking with this.

Yep.

Okay.

Alright, so as long as they didn't— they could go back and they could reformat older recipes, but as long as they didn't do anything to them, it would not affect them at all then. So they could just start using this moving forward. Okay. Can a link to a previous recipe be inserted in the recipe? Can you put a link to a previous one that may not be formatted in Word?

Currently We do not support such a feature. Actually, that's not the first request for that we've got. And it's something which we easily can do. It's just a question, maybe, where would you like this link to be? I mean, you can maybe on the bottom of the recipe. We have to look into that, how it will best work. But generally, it's not a problem for us to include in the next release. Currently, no, we do not support it.

Okay, that question came from Nicole Harris, so I thought I'd pass that on. If there's any other questions out there, please ask them now. If not, you can put them into the comment bar, and after we're done, I'm sure they'll check them for and be happy to answer your questions, or you can contact them directly. They're going to leave you a link, and they're actually going to plug in the, I think, the presentation or something in there too, you said.

Definitely, yes.

So there'll be more information. I'll be happy to talk to you.

And one thing I think— yeah, and one more thing if I may add, which I'm sure Stephanie is also going to support. We'll be happy actually to, as an introductionary offer which we do, and we're very grateful that you're still hosting us, for anybody watching the presentation, we'll be happy to do a one-on-one session on the plugin. If they need more help with how and where it will fit best in their blog. So we'll be happy to do a Skype or— we have different tools— but online session which will show and tell how it will best work for your blog and help you install it and help you get best results with it. Great.

I think you had mentioned that there's some other sites using this, some Some people are using your nutritional information. Are you permitted to share that?

Oh, no, absolutely. By the way, we actually— the nutritional information is used outside of the plugin. Epicurious will be launching with us pretty soon over about 300,000 recipes, actually, on their entire site. That will be in July. We have the Daily Meal, which uses our service for nutrition. And we have also Whole Foods. Who do use our service for their local sites, Whole Foods Market Cooking— pretty long name, if you ask me. But they're great sites with great recipes, so we are also there. So we are on at least 3 sites. We are in conversation with quite a few other large publishers. So we expect to have great development soon with New York Times, with Serious Eats, and with others. But yes, we have 3 large publishers which use our nutritional information, so you may stay really safe that our nutritional information is of highest quality, as we are being audited constantly, I assure you.

Yeah, I know that's one issue that we have come up from time to time is the— how it's calculated. How is yours calculated? We have that question from Al Curtin just asked.

Wonderful question. We are a semantic technology company. What we really do, we read the entire recipe, particularly the ingredient list, and the rest of the recipe as well, actually. But we read the ingredient list and the recipe, and we extract from there information about the cooking techniques being used, the ingredients being used, the quantities being used. Then we use several databases on the backend to find the nutritional information about each ingredient used, most notably the USDA database for foods, but also several other proprietary databases and quite a few ingredients which we've entered ourselves, more exotic ingredients like goji junken, quite a few such ingredients. And we, based on the information which we extracted, we calculate the nutritional information. We actually take take in consideration things like if it's a broth recipe, we will know that the solids do not stay as part of the nutrition of the recipe. If it's the fried recipe or fried recipe, we understand that these 4 quarts of oil are not being part of the nutritional data of the recipe. So we have all this clever logic on the backend which allows us to calculate the correct nutritional information depending on the the content of the recipe and the type of the techniques being used for it.

Great.

That's our bread and butter, really.

We have another question here from Ninja Baker, and I'm not sure what it is, but she wants to know, will this work with Drupal?

Nope, we currently unfortunately support only WordPress. We are thinking about potentially supporting Drupal and other technologies technologies and platforms, but currently no, we do not support Drupal. However, if you have more advanced skills in— or somebody's free for you on NMM, on developer.nmm.com, which provides the nutritional information and which you can use on any platform. Really, but you need obviously to have some more advanced technical skills. So that's the only option which we currently offer, and it's limited to intrashow informational for other platforms. Okay.

All right, well, is there anything else you'd like to share with us? That's all the questions I have right now. Stephanie, anything else? Or Marco?

So I have on the plugin— Stephanie?

I think we covered it all.

Okay, great.

Very informative session, and I think it takes the burden— we all like to have some nutritional information, but the biggest thing was the responsibility, the liability, and by you calculating it for us, kind of removes that from us. And if these other major sites are using it, we know it's got to be good because they wouldn't be using it otherwise. I know Whole Foods is is kind of really particular about what they do. So that works for me.

Yep, it's a constant battle for us to improve, and we improve all the time, so we hope you like it. Okay, great.

All right, well, we're gonna call it then for tonight. That's it for our Community Education Series, and thank you so much for coming by. And Stephanie and Ianco, thank you for spending time with us and sharing your plugin with us, and I Hope if you have questions, you'll leave them for them or contact them directly, and I know they'll take care of you. All right, thanks again for coming.

Thank you, sir, Dennis Littley.

Thanks so much.

Thank you.

And we'll see you soon.

Great, thank you.