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No doubt they are popping the corks on some bubbly and passing around some dainty little crudités in the Napa Valley offices of Digital Chef, after Thursday's announcement that the online retailer of gourmet food and cooking products completed a $35 million (US$) round of venture financing.
Digital Chef also announced that it has purchased the rights to the name and content of Eating Well, the now-defunct healthy cooking magazine, and hired its former editor-in-chief to shape its online editorial content. The acquisition included nearly 2,000 recipes created by the magazine's test kitchen. They will be incorporated into Digital Chef's extensive 3,000-recipe archive.
With the Eating Well acquisition, Digital Chef clearly is intent on creating unique editorial content for its site, recognized as one of the leading food sites on the Web. Having $35 million in the bank can certainly help sharpen the pen and lend some erudite to the crudites.
"Our new funding and the acquisition of Eating Well magazine's name and content point to our ongoing site expansion," commented Digital Chef CEO, Kevin Applebaum. "Our ultimate goal is to become a vital and integral part of our consumers daily lives."
The site features 3,500 gourmet food and cooking products, recipes and cooking tips from the Culinary Institute of America - joint venture partners in the site - and more than 100 other chefs, menu planning and other features.
A Clickable Feast
If you guessed that food would be ranked behind the travel industry as the second most lucrative e-commerce industry in 2003 by online research firm eMarketer, you are probably not the type that features macaroni & cheese and chicken pot pies for dinner seven nights of the week.
Forrester Research concurs with eMarketer, saying that sales of food and drink on the Internet are expected to reach $463 million by 2001 and it will be one of the fastest-growing e-commerce categories.
Gourmet food is currently a $40 billion a year business in the United States and it is expected to surge to $50 billion by next year. Sales of kitchen cookware and small appliances account for an additional $10 billion in sales.
Digital Chef appears well-positioned to catch the anticipated upsurge. Founded in 1997, it has signed exclusive deals with AOL, Yahoo! and CNN to become the premier provider of gourmet food and cookware on their sites.
