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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Simply Recipes

Dotdash Acquires Simply Recipes and Serious Eats from Fexy Media

Digital publisher Dotdash announced today that it has acquired the websites Simply Recipes and Serious Eats from Fexy Media. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Dotdash was already a sizeable player in the consumer content publishing space, owning such brands as The Spruce, Lifewire, TreeHugger and Liquor.com. This is the fifth acquisition for Dotdash since 2019. According to the press announcement, Simply Recipes and Serious Eats will keep using Fexy’s Relish shoppable recipe and menu-planning technology, and Relish will be added across The Spruce Eats.

Combined, Simply Recipes and Serious Eats reach more than 16 million people per month (comScore August 2020) the two companies reported in its press release. Dotdash is acquiring the 27 employees of Simply Recipe and Serious Eats, and plans to invest in both properties. Dotdash CEO Neil Vogel told Axios:

“To make a food site work now, you have to make GIFs. You have to have incredible video capabilities,” says Vogel. “You have to explore the cultural history of recipes and talk about nutrition. All these things you never had to do 5 years ago, but now you have to do them.”

Dotdash will continue to monetize the sites through advertising, though Vogel told Axios that the number and types of ads on both sites will be more optimized.

Fexy’s network of partner recipe sites also includes brands such as FoodieCrush, Recipe Girl and Macheesmo, which offers shoppable recipes via the Relish platform. Additionally, earlier this year at the height of pandemic panic-shopping, the company released an online tool that let you see if certain goods are in-stock at your local Target and Walmart. We reached out to Fexy Media to find out more about this deal from its end and will update this post as we hear back.

The pandemic has also provided an opportune time for Dotdash to bolster its recipe-related content. With COVID shutting down dine-in options at restaurants (and closing restaurants altogether), more people have been pushed into preparing more of their meals at home. Simply Recipes and Serious Eats are both big brand names in the world of food that should help Dotdash expand its reach.

UPDATE: an earlier version of this story listed recipe partner sites as being owned by Fexy.

Amazon Teams With Fexy To Create Shoppable Recipes

Who says the recipe is dead?

Definitely not Amazon. Last week the tech giant teamed with Fexy Media, a food media company that owns such brands as Simply Recipes and Serious Eats, to integrate one-click shopping into recipes. According to a report in Progressive Grocer, Prime members will be able to click a buy button within the recipe that allows them to instantly add the ingredients to a shopping cart, which will then be delivered within hours by Amazon’s same-day delivery service, Prime Now. According to the post, the new shop-by-recipe service is available across “tens of thousands of items” on Prime Now.

It’s an intriguing move for Amazon, who as I wrote last week, first started looking at shop-by-recipe technology as early as 2011. That’s when the company first filed a patent application entitled “Automatic item selection and ordering based on recipe.” Amazon was eventually issued patent in 2015. Not surprisingly, when you compare the mockup in the patent to the implementation with Fexy, they pretty much look the same:

This isn’t the first effort to connect the recipe to a virtual grocery shopping cart. Swedish startup Northfork is working with the largest grocery store in Sweden in Coop as well as the country’s largest retailer ICA to offer one-click grocery cart integration with recipes as well as personalized meal kits. According to Northfork, recipe driven sales now account for one in five orders online for Coop.

Seattle-based Fexy is an interesting partner for Amazon. The company, co-CEO’d by the husband and wife team of Cliff and Lisa Sharples, has been rolling up established food sites over the last few years such as Serious Eats (and Kenji Lopez’s Food Lab), Road Food and Simply Recipes. The Sharples have a long history in Internet commerce: Lisa Sharples is the former President of Allrecipes.com, and the two got their start early in e-commerce back in the original dot-com boom, taking gardening site Garden.com public back in 1999.