Cloud-based notekeeping service Evernote found its first 20 million users through sheer geek appeal. Hardcore users (full disclosure: that includes me) love the ability to upload Web clips, documents, images, audio files, and other materials to Evernote’s online notebooks, then search and retrieve them at will, from virtually any device. They also like features such as Evernote’s ability to recognize and search the text in photos and scanned documents.

But to grow to its first billion users—and CEO Phil Libin thinks that’s a realistic goal—the company may need to stop thinking about features and start thinking about experiences.

“The mainstream isn’t looking for fantastically powerful solutions. They are looking for real, elegant, magical solutions. And it turns out it’s much harder to build those,” Libin says.

But the Mountain View, CA-based startup has begun to move in a more magical direction. In the last couple of months, the company has rolled out three mobile apps and one Web app that tie into its central notekeeping service but are designed to offer dedicated, simple solutions to common problems, such as remembering the people you meet (Hello), keeping a record of your favorite meals (Food), learning new subjects (Peek), and clearing away distractions for a more streamlined reading experience on the Web (Clearly). And last summer, Evernote hired the Australian creators of a drawing app called Skitch and came out with a free tablet version of the image-annotation tool.

It might seem to outsiders as if Evernote has taken a left turn, forsaking its identity as an online personal archive in order to go after the sexy new thing, i.e., mobile apps. But in fact, it’s all part of a deliberate strategy to “add structure, intelligence, and context” to the information people are already storing in Evernote, Libin says. “If Evernote 1.0 was ‘Whatever you put in you can get out in the same format many years later,’ the next phase is ‘Whatever you get back is better’—it has been illuminated, so to speak.”

Libin says he means that in the medieval sense of an illuminated manuscript, such as a Bible decorated with initials, miniature illustrations, and other marginalia. “We really want your memories to be better—to have additional context and beauty in them,” he says. “One of the first steps is to start creating beautiful experiences for certain types of memories. They all live in the central Evernote location, but there are custom experiences for capturing and recalling particular things, like food, and people, and other stuff in the future.”

How Evernote designs these new custom experiences will be one of the themes of a public Xconomy event in Mountain View, CA, on February 7, where I’ll be interviewing Libin on stage, together with Evernote investors Gary Little, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, and Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital. The evening’s main point will be to dissect the idea of the “100 year company,” that is, Libin’s plan to keep Evernote independent and ensure its long-term survival through serial secondary fundraising rounds. But there’s so much to say about Evernote’s app strategy that this will be a big topic as well. (Register for the event before January 24 to get the saver rate.)

I didn’t want to wait until February 7 to learn more about the app strategy, so I connected with Libin (pictured above right) for a long conversation on Friday. I started off by asking whether Evernote ever expected to have 20 million users—a milestone it announced it had reached shortly after the new year. “Yes, in the sense that when we were raising money, our business plan has us getting to 20 million right about now, so it’s exactly what we told our investors,” Libin answered. “On the other hand, we never actually believed it, so getting there is quite shocking.”

But as mind-blowing as it can be to actually hit one’s business-plan projections, Libin says he keeps reminding himself that there are still 6.98 billion people on the planet who aren’t yet using Evernote. Even if you narrow that down to the people with some access to smartphones and the Internet, “that’s probably 2 billion people right now who are easily within reach, and in 10 years, more like 4 billion,” he says. “So having a couple of billion users is not … Next Page »

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[Editor's note: We asked a group of Xconomists to answer the following question: "If you could patent one thing, what would it be?"]

Transgenic foods that are programmed and cultivated not so much to lower costs at the risk of ruining health and the environment, but the opposite—like a tomato that produces lots of Omega3 EFAs.

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Ayer, MA-based Cambrooke Foods might be a bit deceiving on the surface. It is not a maker of packaged foods the average shopper would pick up at the grocery store. And its founders have no background in the food, health, or nutrition industries.

Cambrooke’s founders, David and Lynn Paolella, come from architecture and jeweler backgrounds, respectively. They are the parents of two children with phenylketonuria (PKU), an inherited metabolic disorder that renders the body unable to process the amino acid phenylalnine, found in many foods. If gone untreated, the amino acid can hit toxic levels in the body and cause brain damage.

Patients can go on to live healthy, relatively symptom-free lives if they keep low protein diets, which rule out most store-bought foods. See, even items you wouldn’t necessarily put in the protein category on the food pyramid—like Wonder Bread—are still too high in the nutrient for PKU patients to eat, as they are limited to around 5 grams of protein per day.

Cambrooke first got into business developing low-protein foods with the hope of alleviating parents of PKU patients from having to cook everything from scratch. Their online catalogue of food products now contains items from bagels to veggie “meatballs” to “cheese ravioli,” and are targeted at other types diet-treated metabolic disorders as well.

“We make bread without flour, cheese without milk, and meat analogues without any protein,” says David Paolella.

Treatment for PKU patients (and those with similar disorders) needs to go beyond a low-protein diet, though. Their bodies still need protein, but without the toxic amino acids. Cambrooke has been working since its inception with scientists at the University of Wisconsin and in 2010 started selling a protein called glytactin that is safe for PKU patients to eat.

Glytactin is a natural protein more complex peptide, and it stays in the patient’s system longer than free amino acids, which traditional metabolic formulas for PKU patients have been made up of, says Paolella. He likened the difference in the two types of nutrients to complex carbohydrates and simple sugars, respectively. Thus, glytactin is said to keep patients fuller for longer and is better processed by the body than the free amino acids that previously dominated PKU metabolic supplements. Cambrooke sells glytactin in a powder form called Camino PRO BetterMilk that can be mixed into drinks, and RESTORE—a sports drink lookalike.

Cambrooke’s foods and metabolic formulas are more complex than what grocery stores … Next Page »

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Let’s face it: Your whole Thanksgiving weekend is going to be about food. So you might as well start a day early by watching the video below, which captures the entirety of the Food Startups Meetup I moderated last week in downtown San Francisco. Where else, after all, are you going to see the founders of fascinating Bay Area startups like Artisan Growers & Producers, Back to the Roots, E la Carte, Foodspotting, and Foodzie all in one place?

The video is 1 hour, 16 minutes long, and was captured by blogger, programmer, entrepreneur, and photographer Kevin Warnock, who also took the photographs shown here. (All media used by permission; click on the photos to see larger versions.)

Alexa Andrzejewski

The panelists at this event included:

Alexa Andrzejewski, co-founder and CEO of Foodspotting
Nikhil Arora, co-founder, Back to the Roots
Nate Gallon, partner, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
Rob LaFave, co-founder and CEO, Foodzie
Ananda Neil, founder, Artisan Growers and Producers
Rajat Suri, co-founder and CEO, E la Carte

Nikhil Arora

The only company on this list that I’ve had time to write about in a feature article is E la Carte, but I’m looking forward to getting to know the other startups too, because I think food—or, more specifically, the way we decide what to eat—is one of the next big areas where mobile and Internet technology will change our thinking and our behavior. Each of the panelists’ companies is involved in some way in helping people be more informed, more efficient, or more social about their eating choices. (With the exception of Nate Gallon, who shared his perspectives both as a self-confessed foodie and as an attorney familiar with the startup formation and funding process in Silicon Valley.)

Rob LaFave

A few highlights to look for in the video:

12:45 I kicked off the formal discussion with the proposition that there’s been a fundamental increase over the last few years in public awareness about food quality and nutrition. Rob LaFave was the first to react, basically agreeing with my premise and explaining how Foodzie is trying to capitalize on this shift. The other panelists followed.

25:35 The panelists respond to my question about the unique barriers and challenges faced by entrepreneurs involved in the food industry.

42:06 I asked a long-winded question about whether the food startup sector might be getting too frothy, and whether food startups are “investable” from a classic venture capital perspective. The panelists answered starting at this point.

54:30 Audience Q&A begins.

Rajat Suri

The Food Startups meetup group formed this summer, with Matthew Wise as its main instigator. Wise is the serial entrepreneur behind both Founderly—an amazing site building an archive of documentary interviews with entrepreneurs—and TableSlice, a stealth-mode startup in the food sector. He invited me to moderate the November 16 panel after reading my June 2011 article Silicon Chef: A Half-Baked Guide to Food Startups, where I listed every notable company I could find that’s using the Internet or mobile technology to sell, promote, or celebrate food and nutrition. It’s a fast-growing list, and as you’ll see from the Q&A portion of the video, there are plenty more Bay Area entrepreneurs thinking about stretching their startup wings in the food niche.

Here’s the video.

Food Startups from Kevin Warnock on Vimeo.

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Yesterday we told you about The Eatery, a new iPhone app from San Francisco-based Massive Health. The app lets users snap photos of their meals, rate how healthy they are, and get a reality check on those ratings from other users. While the app is designed to be fun, it also has a serious point—if people are more aware of what they’re eating, they’ll eat better (at least in theory).

Well, The Eatery is shaping up as a viral success story. In just the first 48 hours since the app’s debut in the iTunes App Store, users have shared 200,000 meal ratings, according to Massive Health intern Andrew Rosenthal. “It’s addictive,” Rosenthal says. “That means we have a big data set about what people are eating, and what they and other people think of those meals.”

Along with the photos and ratings, Massive Health collects location data, which means it’s already gleaning some interesting insights about where people are when they submit meal photos, and how those locations correlate with the ratings. Specifically, it’s looking like people eat less healthy meals when they’re at work.

The heat maps below, shared with Xconomy by Massive Health, show ratings from people in New York City and San Francisco. Unhealthy meals are in red and healthy meals are in green.

See all those red areas in the SoMa and Financial District areas of San Francisco, and the mid-town and downtown areas of Manhattan? It’s a sign that people are loading up on burritos, potato chips, and soda at work.

That’s not the most surprising finding in the world, perhaps, but it’s interesting that Massive Health was able to gather a data set like this in just two days. “With people from around the world rating meals, it turns out that we have some data that nobody else has,” comments Rosenthal. And as the data piles up, who knows—it could make interesting fodder for nutritionists, epidemiologists, or marketers.

The maps are interesting for a second reason as well. They illustrate exactly where early-adopters in the mobile app world—the people who are likely to download and use an app on the first day or two after its release—tend to congregate.

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Do phones, food, photos, and fitness mix? Massive Health is hoping they do. The San Francisco mobile health startup, which debuted last spring with $2.25 million in seed funding from Felicis Ventures, Greylock, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, and Mohr Davidow Ventures, has come out with its first consumer app. It’s called The Eatery, and it’s designed to get iPhone owners to think more carefully about how they stuff their faces.

Introduced yesterday, The Eatery invites you to use your iPhone’s camera to take a picture of your meal—before you eat it, ideally—and then to rate it from “Fat” to “Fit” on an 11-star scale. The app will track your entries, and on a daily and weekly basis it will send you summaries intended to help you discover patterns and make healthier eating choices. There’s also a social element: you can connect with Facebook friends who also use The Eatery, and they’ll rate your meal photos too, providing a sort of reality check on your own ratings.

It’s all wrapped up inside a user interface that’s on the far slick-and-elegant end of the design spectrum. Noticeably absent: any way of quantifying what you’re eating, in terms of ounces, calories, or fat or carbohydrate content. “There are a bunch of apps in the App Store that are more about recording what you ate rather than helping you eat better,” says Massive Health CEO Sutha Kamal. “They are asking the wrong question. What you really should care about is how you are eating day to day or month to month.” The idea, Kamal says, is that simply paying more attention to what you’re eating and getting feedback from friends will prompt you to start eating better.

When Massive Health came out of stealth mode back in February, the team of ex-Mozilla, ex-Linden Lab, ex-gaming entrepreneurs declared that they wanted to bring great user-centered interaction design to the healthcare sector. They said they intended to build mobile apps that used crowdsourcing, game mechanics, social networking, and data analytics to help people deal with chronic health conditions.

True to that promise, Kamal says the startup is developing a diabetes app that’s still in alpha testing. But the company decided to bring out The Eatery first, as a way to get something into consumers’ hands faster and start testing its thesis that health apps will have more uptake and impact if they deliver what Kamal calls “delightful experiences.” With some pride, he describes The Eatery as “the most beautiful app in the Health part of the App Store…you don’t feel like there is a lot of work being done on your part, but a huge amount of value is being delivered.”

The startup isn’t planning to make any money on The Eatery, Kamal says. In fact, it’s presenting the app as “Massive Health Experiment 01″ rather than a full-fledged product. “This is a place where we are expecting to learn a lot,” Kamal says. The revenue opportunities will come down the road, when MassiveHealth introduces apps that help employers, insurers, and patients lower healthcare costs, he says.

In a phone chat yesterday with Kamal, I asked where the idea for The Eatery came from, how he thinks it will fit with existing social and mobile usage patterns, and where MassiveHealth is going from here. A summary of our conversation follows.

Xconomy: What’s the big idea behind The Eatery?

Sutha Kamal: If you step back and think about Massive Health as a macro thing, what we’re trying to do is build a lot of enduring value around helping people change their lives and stay healthy. We have another alpha [product] going in the diabetes space, and we have concluded that if you are thinking about getting and staying healthy, you care about four things: diet, exercise, medication adherence, and lastly … Next Page »

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New York startup Gojee says it raised $1.2 million in a seed round led by Kapor Capital. Gojee CEO Michael LaValle said via e-mail that Brad Hunstable, co-founder and president of Ustream, will serve as an advisor. Gojee curates recipes for its members based on ingredients ostensibly from their own kitchens. The recipes come from food bloggers chosen by Gojee’s staff. According to LaValle, Gojee is also doubling its roster of food bloggers to 160 from the current 80.

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Sometimes a startup needs to pivot a few times until it finds just the right idea. Similar to chefs trying out new dishes, Gojee co-founder Michael LaValle says his one-year-old company changed its own formula twice before its latest idea caught on this summer. The New York startup curates recipes based on the ingredients its users’ keep in their respective kitchens.

Gojee offers its subscribers links to recipes based on the ingredients they list. LaValle, 31, a West Point grad and a former analyst, says Gojee features dishes from some 80 food bloggers chosen by the staff. “It depends on how much history [the bloggers] have in writing, the quality of their photos, and how easy their recipes are to cook,” LaValle says. Gojee is geared for intrepid cooks who may not be master chefs but are not complete beginners, he says.

So far Gojee is bootstrapped, but LaValle says the company is in talks for its first outside funding, which he hopes to close within the next six weeks. He declined to specify the amount of funding being sought, and LaValle is not in a rush to grow Gojee’s staff of seven. “We’re not trying to expand,” he says. “We need runway to make sure we can keep this trajectory.”

Gojee accidentally called attention to itself this summer, according to LaValle. From March until late June, the company ran an open beta test primarily with friends and family trying out the site. That changed after a Gojee staffer simply asked designer Tina Roth Eisenberg for input, which led to … Next Page »

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Wine aficionados can be rather choosy about what they will imbibe. The casual drinker may simply pair any red wine with steak, but New York’s Lot18 wants to serve those with highly discerning tastes.

Lot18 is a members-only website that sells wine and gourmet food products that are available in limited supply. Though the website might not sell Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon—which typically costs several thousand dollars per bottle—it does offer wines from fellow California winery Jonata, which is hard to find in stores. “[Jonata] is not a $1,000 wine, but it’s a $100 wine,” says Lot18′s Philip James.

One-year-old Lot18, co-founded by James and Kevin Fortuna, has more than 400,000 registered consumers all eager to satisfy their cravings for unique vino and repasts. James says Lot18 lists select wines from small wineries, as well as large producers such as Robert Mondavi Wines. “Maybe it’s a prized vintage, a special blend, or an incredibly high-scoring wine,” he says. “We don’t have 2,000 products on the site; we have five to 10 [at a time].”

Lot18 has been quick to find financial backers. The company has already raised $13 million in funding—including $10 million in April—and as of March was generating more than $1 million in average monthly sales. (James declined to offer more current sales stats.) Investors in Lot18 include … Next Page »

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Maybe it’s because I’m hungry, but I’ve been thinking about the future of restaurants lately. Like a lot of people, I eat out far too often, and I have strong feelings about the way the experience should go—the food, the service, the ambience, and so on.

So does Josh Bob. OK, it’s his job (though maybe he’s hungry too). Bob is the founder and CEO of Boston-based Textaurant, a startup that runs a mobile service aimed at taking the hassle out of waiting for a table, and boosting customer loyalty through deals and offers. Using the service, restaurants can send text alerts to customers’ mobile phones telling them their table is almost ready. So Textaurant does away with buzzers and pagers and tries to reduce the workload on the host, while helping the restaurant win over customers who would otherwise leave and not come back.

In case you’re wondering if this causes restaurants to lose out on business from people waiting at the bar, Bob says surveys show more than 40 percent of people will leave (and not even consider going to the bar) if told there is a long wait. That’s the lost business Textaurant is trying to save—and not just by texting them, but also by opening up a channel whereby restaurants can offer special deals and rewards.

The three-person startup is backed by Massachusetts angel investors (and 500 Startups’ Twilio micro-fund) and counts among its dozen or so customers Finale Desserterie & Bakery, Fire + Ice, and Red Robin Gourmet Burgers. It is a finalist in the MassChallenge accelerator program. (You can expect a rebranding and name change along with a new website in the next month, Bob says.)

Textaurant is part of a thriving mini-cluster of food- and restaurant-related startups around Boston that also includes Plummelo, I Am Hungry, Text My Food, Good Eats For Me, and Objective Logistics (see profile here). To some extent, the technologies offered by these companies are a subset of the local-marketing, loyalty, and deals systems that have permeated small-business life as of late. But restaurants have their own quirks and challenges. They are not usually the most eager adopters of new technologies, which can be very polarizing among their managers and staff.

“The restaurant industry has to change,” Bob says. “Anyone who doesn’t use technology will get left behind.”

So here’s his vision of what going to a restaurant will be like five years from now. You’ll decide you want to go to a certain type of restaurant (Italian or Chinese, say) or a particular neighborhood, he says. You’ll use your mobile device to look at Textaurant, which will show you that there are five Italian places nearby, say, and what the wait time is at each of them. You’ll check yourself in at one of the restaurants—with or without setting foot in it—and customize how the table alert will come to you (via text, voice, Twitter, or e-mail). You can also pre-order drinks for the table so they’ll be waiting for you when you sit down.

What’s more, your phone will be connected to your bill so you can accrue loyalty points based on purchases and receive special offers (like a free appetizer at the bar), he says. And on your way out, you’ll pay through your Textaurant account or another mobile system connected to your credit card or payment account.

Groupon, by the way, will have morphed into something else that’s probably unrecognizable today, Bob says. (Presumably along with other daily deal sites.) Not that it’s a bad thing, of course.

“There will always be significant value in helping businesses survive,” he says.

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Divya Gugnani grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and told herself she’d never do that.

Now, she’s CEO of two startups. One of which, she says, is out to transform the way women shop. That would be Send The Trend, a website that sells personalized accessories like jewelry and scarves. It’s one of the many New York fashion-focused sites that has started up in the last couple of years.

Gugnani, who early on developed a passion for cooking, pursued a traditional career in finance after graduating from Cornell, taking positions at Goldman Sachs, and private equity and VC firms Investcorp International and iFormation. Those exposed her to the creative side of startups.

“I really got to see how people started a business: how they grow it, how they start it, the problems they have,” she says. “I really got to get a feel for business, but the end of the day you haven’t done it. As much as I loved being a venture capitalist, there was just this bug in my body that wants to be on the other side.”

It took her a few years, though. She went to Harvard Business School, mainly because “working in finance for four years is enough to kill someone,” she says. She ended up cooking a lot and making new friends, but when she was done, jumped right back into venture capital.

While working at FirstMark Capital, Gugnani had the idea to turn her passion for cooking into a social website for tips on recipes, nutrition and mixology. A colleague encouraged her to pursue it as a fun side project in 2008, and months later Gugnani quit her career in VC to run the site, Behind the Burner, full time.

Living the scrappy startup life exposed Gugnani to the challenges most women face while shopping, she says. “From that experience my life as a woman changed dramatically. It used to be that a great sales rep would say, ‘this is what you need to wear.’ Shopping was an activity where you got so much service and customization. Once you don’t take a salary, shopping sucks.”

“Women have a hard time shopping, whether it’s online or not online, they can’t discover the things they want to buy,” Gugnani says. “Discovery is the biggest problem.

So last year Gugnani launched Send the Trend with friend Mariah Chase, who had worked with Project Runway winner Christian Siriano. The trio developed a website that surveys women on their style preferences and brings them … Next Page »

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Memorial Day observances made last week shorter than usual, but there was enough news from the local information technology sector for any week twice its length.

—San Francisco-based Rock Health, a new incubator for companies focused on using digital technologies to fix inefficiencies in the healthcare system, unveiled its first class of startups. They range from to CellScope, which makes smartphone attachments that can be used to diagnose ear infections, to Omada Health, a social network for diabetics.

—My Friday column took a look at the burgeoning world of food startups, where entrepreneurs are using the Web and mobile devices to simplify everything from to finding a farmer’s market to understanding nutrition labels. The column includes a list of nearly 60 startups, including 10 whose names start with “Food” (Foodbuzz, Foodia, Foodily, Foodista, Foodler, Foodori, Foodspotting, Foodtree, Fooducopia, and Foodzie).

—One of the companies on my list was Grubwithus, a Y Combinator-backed company that helps users sign up for discounted restaurant meals with strangers as a way of getting to know new people. Grubwithus expanded to Boston last week on its way to building a network of 30 U.S. cities, as my colleague Erin reported.

—With the May launch of xoJane, a new online magazine from publishing icon Jane Pratt, San Francisco-based Say Media began to reveal itself as a budding network of niche publications fueled by rich media ads. I talked with Say Media CEO Matt Sanchez about the company’s journey from video hosting provider to vertical media empire.

—Convore, a Y Combinator-backed startup co-founded by former Pownce founder Leah Culver, is out to reboot the idea of real-time group chat, an idea that’s been with us since the late 1980s in the form of Internet Relay Chat, or IRC. Convore’s system is Web-based and has key features that were always missing from IRC, such as persistent user identities and archives of old conversations.

—Waltham, MA-based Polaris Venture Partners revealed plans to open a new office in Palo Alto, CA, as Xconomy editor-in-chief Bob Buderi reported. The move came less than a week after news that Polaris is shuttering its Seattle office due to poor deal flow there.

—In funding news, SiTime raised $20 million, Punchtab raised $850,000, Miramar Labs raised $36 million, Mindflash raised $4 million, and Juice in the City raised $6 million.

—Oakland, CA-based Pandora set its IPO terms, saying it hopes to raise between $96 million and $123 million.

—Zendesk announced plans to move its headquarters this summer from SoMa to the Central Market district of San Francisco, where Twitter will also take up residence next year. Both companies are taking advantage of payroll tax break designed to spur economic revitalization in the beleaguered downtown district.

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[Updated 11/17/11 with additional listings] When the ex-CEO of Pure Digital, maker of the famous Flip pocket camcorder, wins funding from Sequoia Capital to open a chain of grilled cheese sandwich shops, it may be time to abandon your own enterprise-cloud-marketing-analytics-automation venture or your social-mobile-deals-gamification startup and think about getting into the food business.

I was already planning to compile a list of food-related startups for my column this week when I read about Pure founder Jonathan Kaplan’s surprise announcement. I happen to love grilled cheese, so I’m hoping that his new restaurants, to be called The Melt, fare better than the Flip camcorder, which Cisco recently discontinued after spending $590 million to buy Pure in 2009. The fact that Kaplan’s customers will be able to order and pay for their cheddar melts and tomato soup using their mobile phones is a nice twist. But the real message behind his move (and Sequoia’s investment) may be that food is back in fashion as an arena for startup founders.

Food-delivery startups such as Kozmo and Webvan were among the venture-backed companies caught up in the wave of dot-com failures around 2001, and years went by before technology entrepreneurs dared to venture back into the kitchen. But now they’re cooking with gas. Few urban-dwellers these days make a restaurant reservation without consulting a site like Yelp, Urbanspoon, or OpenTable. Smartphone and tablet owners can choose from hundreds of cooking, nutrition, and shopping apps. And there’s nary a venture incubator program without at least one food startup in its pantry (500 Startups has Spoondate, StartX has Kitchit, TechStars has Foodzie, and Y Combinator has Anyleaf, E la Carte, and Grubwithus, among others).

Here in San Francisco, a chocolate tasting organized by health-food search site Foodia last week attracted more than 400 young entrepreneurs—I know because I was elbowing them out of the way. There’s also a monthly meetup for hackers building food-related apps, and even tech publisher O’Reilly Media has come out with a cookbook. (It’s called Cooking for Geeks, and it’s really well done.)

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise—at a time when farmer’s markets are popping up in every town square, cooking and celebrity-chef shows keep multiplying on TV, and concern over the health impact of poor nutrition is growing—that startup types are trying to turn their food obsessions into businesses. With their usual ardor, these entrepreneurs are finding and fixing previously undiscovered inefficiencies in every part of the food business, from managing recipes and making grocery lists to reserving restaurant tables, reading nutrition labels, and figuring out which wine to buy.

But there are so many new food-related companies on the scene that it’s impossible not to wonder whether the market’s getting a bit frothy. Quick, can you tell me the difference between Foodbuzz, Foodia, Foodily, Foodista, Foodler, Foodori, Foodspotting, Foodtree, Fooducopia, and Foodzie? In the end, I suspect that there isn’t really room for three companies that page restaurant guests when their table is ready (No Wait, Textaurant, and ReadyPing), three marketplaces for artisanal food products (Foodoro, Fooducopia, and Foodzie), two members-only restaurant deals services (TipCity and VillageVines), and dozens of recipe search apps and sites. If DARPA were funding all this activity, it would simply hold a bake-off to find the top competitors. We’ll have to wait longer to see which of these startup soufflés get some lift, and which ones collapse.

Meanwhile, here’s today’s main dish: a list of all the notable food-related startups I could find in one afternoon of research. I tried to restrict this list to companies that are making significant use of software, mobile technology, or the Web (if only as a marketing and distribution channel). I focused my search mainly on companies in Xconomy’s home cities, especially San Francisco, and I deliberately didn’t hunt down the names of every maker of every food-related iPhone or Android app. So I know the list is incomplete. But if you know of a name that deserves to be added, please let me know in the comment section.

AllRecipes—Large online catalog of user-contributed recipes.

Anyleaf—Listings of local supermarket discounts; a replacement for Sunday coupon circulars.

Back to the Roots—Home mushroom growing kits using recycled coffee grounds.

BigOven—Web and mobile recipe organizer and shopping list maker.

BlackboardEats—Members get e-mails with 30 percent discount offers for select restaurants in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco.

Chow—Food-related news, entertainment, and instruction. Owned by CBS Interactive.

Cocomama Foods—Online vendor of gluten-free foods such as quinoa cereals.

Consmr—A social network that allows users to “check in” to the grocery products they’re eating.

Cookooree—Community recipe sharing “for the rest of us.”

Cookstr—Recipes from leading chefs and cookbook authors.

Daily Gourmet—E-mail newsletter offering daily deals on artisanal foods.

Daily Grape—Daily wine review videos from Gary Vaynerchuk, formerly of WineLibrary.tv.

… Next Page »

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Slackers hate it. Go-getters love it. And store owners and managers? Well, so far they seem to be buying it. I’m talking about Objective Logistics, a New Bedford, MA-based software startup that’s looking to transform work environments, starting with restaurants and retail stores.

“It’s polarizing as hell,” says CEO and co-founder Phil Beauregard.

If you believe controversial companies are good, you’ve come to the right place. Objective Logistics has created a Facebook-like interface that accesses the point-of-sale database of a given store, ranks the performance of waiters and salespeople compared to their peers, and rewards high achievers with perks like getting to choose their own work schedules. In certain establishments, that can mean an extra $1,000 in tips for working a busy Saturday instead of a slow weekday, for instance.

“We’re kind of ‘gamifying’ the labor market,” Beauregard says. “The real vision is, if I can rank productivity through technology, I can reward you and compel you to perform better.” He adds that his company is about “objective transparency through technology.”

And despite its clunky name, Objective Logistics has been attracting lots of buzz among venture capitalists—and customers—this year. The five-person company’s software was first deployed last month at Not Your Average Joe’s (it’s slated to go live in 15 of those restaurants), with several other local stores and major chains also at various stages of adoption. Objective Logistics has raised $750,000 in seed-stage funding from angel investors including Richard Darer, Greg Pesik, Serguei Netessine, Nigel Machin, and other Boston-area investors. The company might look to close a VC round in the next few months, Beauregard says.

Beauregard, who turns 30 next week, is a former investment banker who started Objective Logistics in early 2009. His partners in crime include co-founder Matt Grace, who was reputed to be the youngest product management director in Oracle’s history, and engineering vice president Dan Velcea, a 3Com and Credit Suisse veteran and a Romanian native who, in 1986, dropped his army-duty AK-47 … Next Page »

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Having a computer-science background, an appetite for risk, and an eye for solvable problems put you in a decent position be an Internet entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. But there’s also a downside to these traits. You wind up seeing all the flaws and inefficiencies in everyday things and wondering how you could use Web tools to fix them.

That’s what happened to Jeff Hunter and his college friends Jason Marr and Josh Staiger, all members of the Case Western Reserve University class of 2004. For the last three years, the trio of software engineers from the university in Cleveland, OH, have been renting a house together in Sunnyvale, CA. Hunter and Marr worked at Apple, while Staiger worked at Google—up until last summer, anyway. That’s when they decided to quit their jobs to go on a quest to fix, of all things, the venerable supermarket circular.

“We all like to cook, and we would go to the grocery store fairly frequently,” recounts Hunter. “We’re also all frugal Midwestern boys. My mom grew up clipping coupons and she never buys anything that’s not on sale. She’s given me that frugality gene, and Jason and Josh are the same way.”

But these transplanted Midwesterners have a geometry problem: their house in Sunnyvale is exactly midway between a Safeway supermarket and a Lucky store. “It’s not faster to go to one or the other,” says Hunter. “So we pick the store based on the sales, and the sales are all in the weekly circulars. We’d have them sitting in our dining room table, and we’d flip through them to get ideas for what we should make that week.”

The more time Hunter and his pals spent doing that, though, the more frustrated they got. “Many of the deals are not relevant to you,” he says. “I don’t have a kid, so I don’t care about diapers. And sometimes the deals aren’t that great. You might not know that this $5-a-pound beef isn’t such a great deal, because it was on sale for $2 a pound two weeks ago. As technical guys, we were thinking, ‘This is a very interesting data set—there’s a lot of potentially useful information—but it’s not being presented in a way that makes it useful for us.’ We thought that if we could collect this data, organize it, curate it, and think about all the different products we could make with that, there would have to be some inherent value in that.”

That’s the business concept Hunter, Marr, and Staiger pitched to Y Combinator in early 2010, and it apparently clicked with the venture incubator’s penchant for helping entrepreneurs solve what founder Paul Graham calls “hair on fire” problems. The trio were accepted to the summer 2010 Y Combinator class, and they launched Anyleaf in January. The service lets you sign up for a personalized weekly e-mail newsletter listing the best deals advertised in circulars for stores near your geographic location. If the point of circulars is to get bargain hunters into stores and help them save money, the Anyleaf team reasons, then anything that makes deals easier to discover is good for both stores and customers.

Last week, Anyleaf released its first mobile app, for the Apple iPhone, so now deal hunters can search and browse for the deepest discounts and add their favorite ones to shopping lists on the go. Right now, while the Anyleaf guys study how people are using the app and working out the early kinks, the startup is offering discount data only for stores in the San Francisco Bay Area. But their plan is to go national eventually, and to make money by selling sponsorship opportunities in its newsletters and apps and partnering with stores to offer coupons.

So why do grocery stores use circulars, anyway? Lacking the patience to be a bargain hunter myself, I tend to throw them directly into the recycle bin. But Hunter says they plan an important role in the grocery business.

“Stores use one of two models,” he explains. “It’s the ‘everyday low price’ model versus the ‘high-low’ model.” Wal-Mart is an example of an everyday-low-price chain, offering the same prices all the time. Safeway, by contrast, is a high-low chain, offering … Next Page »

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Eating is usually a social experience. But choosing what to eat—that’s the more solitary pursuit. In most families, the meal planning, not to mention the shopping and the cooking, falls to one person, usually a busy mom who’s toiling alone until the food is on the table.

There’s a startup in San Mateo, CA, that wants to change that. It’s called Foodily, and last year its founders, a group of former Yahoo executives, raised $5 million in venture support from Index Ventures to introduce a slick recipe-search site drawing on hundreds of sources around the Web, including both commercial sites like AllRecipes.com and Epicurious and popular food blogs like Closet Cooking (which specializes in recipes that can be prepared in a tiny, closet-sized kitchen). Foodily presents search results in a unique side-by-side format that makes it easy to compare photos, ratings, and ingredient lists for different recipes.

But that was only the spadework for the real service Foodily’s founders envisioned, which was more like a social network for meal planners. And today the startup has turned on new features that bring that vision to life, by allowing Foodily users to share favorite recipes and whole menus and food-related events with friends.

“There couldn’t be a more frequently asked question than ‘What do you want to eat today,’” says Andrea Cutright, Foodily’s co-founder and CEO. “But it’s a category where the online experience is still rather dated. You go to Google, you enter ‘cauliflower gratin,’ you get 80 million results, and none of them are connected to what people will really eat or what your friends like.” The answer, Cutright says, is social search—one of the rare slices of the Web search market where Google isn’t yet dominant.

Most of Foodily’s new features tap into users’ existing social networks via Facebook Connect. That means you’ll need an account at Facebook, and a network of friends, to take advantage of them. The first order of business is to assemble individual recipes that you find via Foodily into a menu. As a Super Bowl meal for a big group of friends, for example, you might serve spinach stuffed mushrooms, Thai chicken wings, beef stew, and blondies. (The examples are from Foodily design director Phillip Bensaid, not me—I’m neither a carnivore nor much of a football fan.) If you mark the stuffed mushrooms recipe as a favorite in Foodily, it will appear in your Facebook news feed, where your friends will have the opportunity to “like” or comment on your choice.

From within Foodily, you can also set up your Super Bowl party by creating a private event listing on Facebook and inviting selected friends, who can … Next Page »

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Everyone eats more around the holidays, and we at Xconomy are no exception (thanks to the cookies, brownies, and sinful gooey butter cake we’ve had shipped to us). All this chomping got us thinking about the dribs and drabs we’ve heard about area startup companies that are applying innovative technology to the food space on some level—from online menu planning to dieting to customized ice cream to managing lines at restaurants. Read below for some snippets on where food meets technology in Boston. And as always, please inform us of any that we might have missed.

—Those of you with multiple allergies might find e-commerce startup Cocomama Foods to be a breath of fresh air. The Cambridge, MA-based startup is developing all-natural, gluten-free foods produced from ancient grains that it says actually taste good. Its first product—which will likely hit the market in late January—is a hot quinoa (can you pronounce that?) cereal that comes in four flavors. Oh, and it’s also dairy free, soy free, nut free, and vegan, so bring on the dietary restrictions. If it nabs enough funding, Cocomama hopes to eventually expand to a whole family of allergy-free products, says COO Zachary DeAngelo.

—Taunton, MA-based MooBella‘s Ice Creamery Machine has revamped vending machines, with touch screens that enable users to choose from 96 different icy combinations. The company says an order on its high-tech device takes three steps and 40 seconds to churn out a fresh, hard scoop ice cream treat. The company has been working to get its gadget at locations throughout New England, and raised $9 million last month.

—Cambridge’s Plummelo is out to help users get both organized and inspired when it comes to cooking at home. The Web platform allows you to store all those recipes you come across on the Web and input your own. Choose which dishes you want to use for a certain meal, and the site will crawl the recipes to pull together a consolidated list of ingredients you need to pick up at the store—great for people like me who, no matter how hard we try, forget at least one ingredient when shopping for the evening’s big meal. Plummelo’s search engine also lets you scavenge for ideas based on ingredients, occasions, meal types, and dietary needs.

—An MIT student team worked on an online software product called FoodDude, which syncs your computer or smartphone to your grocery loyalty card, so you can better track what’s in your pantry. It also … Next Page »

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“Android kind of felt like a startup,” Ann Arbor native Karl Rosaen says of the original development team for Google’s mobile phone platform. Rosaen says the entire team could fit inside a single conference room at the company headquarters. As a software engineer he saw Android go from the initial device launch to a technology platform that’s giving the iPhone a run for its money. The whole experience made Rosaen want to try his hand at his own venture.

“I had the entrepreneurial itch to start something new and something I cared about,” he says. So he and his wife Cara packed up and moved from the Bay Area back to Michigan last fall. You might expect Rosaen would start a new company focused on mobile apps. The thought ran through his mind, but ultimately he settled on a field that’s getting a lot of attention in the Detroit and Ann Arbor areas lately—locally grown foods.

Rosaen launched his Real Time Farms website this past May, as “a nationwide local food guide,” as Cara calls it. The site relies largely on crowdsourcing to provide Web-based, up-to-the-minute guides on the inventory at farmers markets and other purveyors of locally grown food. “As a user, you can participate by figuring out where food comes from,” says Cara, who joined the company full-time after the website launch. “The other big piece is that you help to create the guide.”

Shoppers at farmer’s markets throughout the country can snap pictures of produce, homemade jams, and other items while browsing, and send the images to Real Time Farms. Over time, the user-submitted content develops into comprehensive guides on what the markets and farmers are carrying. (Check this out to get a peak at what a listing for a farmer’s market looks like.) Users can search markets for particular produce items, like mushrooms, squash, or radishes, and the site will notify them which farm stand has what they’re looking for.

“It’s helping to generate most recent information about what’s available at a farmer’s market,” Cara says.

Karl and Cara say that knowledge of where food originates will help Real Time Farm users eat better, by informing them where to buy fresh produce. But that doesn’t have to apply just to those who cook their own food at home. Real Time Farms is working closely with Ann Arbor-area restaurants, to enable them to post their menus on the site and highlight where ingredients have come from. “It’s a tool for showing off how they’re sourcing locally,” Cara says.

The restaurant piece is where Real Time Farms makes its money, and where it’s putting much of its focus in the coming months. The site is free for shoppers, farmers, and market managers to post, but … Next Page »

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Just a reminder for all you entrepreneurs, hackers, gene-splicers, and devotees of innovation, tomorrow is Xconomy’s second annual pre-Thanksgiving pizza party. We got some great special guests in Reed Sturtevant and Katie Rae of Project 11, an innovative early-stage venture startup; some great attendees already RSVP’d, and some great pizza courtesy of our friends and neighbors at Za.

The party is 12pm-2pm.

We expect the mix will lead to stimulating conversation, important new connections for a lot of guests, general fun banter, and a lot more work for the cleaning crew (although Bob swears he won’t spill the salad this year, in large part because there won’t be any salad!).

Xconomy is in the left ventricle of Kendall Square, at 101 Rogers Street, Suite 402. More specifically, we’re in the historic Old Foundry Works building between Third Street and Fourth Streets, about three blocks north of the Kendall Square T Stop. (Here’s a map.) When you get to the building, give us a buzz on the intercom (or just storm the doors), proceed to the elevator in the middle of the building, and head on up to the 4th floor.

If you think you can come, please drop us a line at editors@xconomy.com, or leave a comment below, so we can know how many pizzas to order.

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These days, the simple act of going to the grocery store is a fraught and anxious affair. Americans are being told that what they choose to eat isn’t just a personal decision, but has major economic, political, and moral implications. For one thing, there’s the spiraling cost to society of food-related health conditions, from obesity and diabetes to heart disease and hypertension. Then there are books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Eating Animals and movies like Supersize Me, Food Inc, and Our Daily Bread, which expose the unsavory sides of a food economy dominated by supermarkets and fast-food joints and the factory farming system that’s grown up to serve them. And, of course, there are the burgeoning organic and local food movements, which argue that foods produced locally and without the use of pesticides or antibiotics are healthier and more sustainable—even if they’re beyond many consumers’ price range.

Into the middle of all this steps ShopWell, a Silicon Valley Web and mobile startup spun off last year by the design consultancy Ideo. The company’s proposition to consumers is simple: tell us a little about you, and we’ll tell you which products on the supermarket shelves best fit your nutritional needs.

It sounds great, given the difficulties ordinary mortals face with the very first step of responsible shopping and eating: trying to figure out how ingredient lists and nutrition labels relate to their own lives. But the company’s plan for making money is a bit more complex. It wants to be an advisor and information broker to food producers, who supposedly lack good data about how consumers make buying decisions in the grocery store and therefore have a terrible record when it comes to launching new products. To collect useful intelligence for its food-industry clients, ShopWell will need lots of users. And to sign up lots of users, it will have to provide non-obvious product recommendations in a usable format.

But frankly, it’s not there yet—which isn’t surprising, given that the company launched its beta site in September and its iPhone app even more recently. So in this third and final installment in our ShopWell case study, we’ll look at the product development challenges the company has ahead of it, and the business-model hypotheses it has yet to test.

[Editor's Note: This is the third article in a three-part series on ShopWell. Part 1 appeared Monday, November 1 and Part 2 appeared on Tuesday, November 2.]

What makes ShopWell worth following, and sets it apart from the scores of Silicon Valley startups launched every month, is not just that it’s trying to validate two premises at once (i.e., that consumers want an easier way to identify healthy food, and that food producers will pay for fine-grained data about consumer preferences). It’s also that the startup’ fate will reflect on Ideo’s ability to launch successful companies. Is the consultancy’s fabled user-centered design philosophy an effective tool in the real rough-and-tumble of startup life? Do good designers also make good entrepreneurs? Such questions may not be answered until ShopWell itself exits the startup market and its venture cashiers ring up the totals.

The Google of Food?

Whatever else it may mean, the “user-centered design” philosophy espoused at Ideo and many other creative hotbeds is about listening to people and creating things they’ll want, rather than force-feeding them products that don’t fit with their existing behaviors. But one of the interesting things about food and wellness, according to ShopWell CEO Jasmine Kim, is that many people only start thinking about the subject once they’re forced to give up their old behaviors. “A big insight from user-centered design”—that is, from the stories people have told Ideo and ShopWell—”is that when you are starting a transition, that is when you need nutrition advice,” Kim says. “You could be told by your doctor, ‘You have type 2 diabetes, eat less sugar,’ but people are left to their own devices to go figure out what they could eat.”

That’s why ShopWell has put a lot of energy into allowing users to filter its database of foods based on health needs—there are simple “preselects” on each users’ account page that will … Next Page »

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