Popular online chef Lina is cooking rice with scallops, mushrooms, and chicken. First she fries marinated chicken and fresh mushrooms, then scallops with shallots, and slowly adds long-grain rice and some rice wine. Then she stirs in the chicken mixture, and pours all the ingredients into a preheated pot. When the mixture is boiling, she covers the pot and turns off the heat. This fragrant dish will be ready to serve in under 30 minutes. After arranging the dish to look its most attractive, Lina takes photos, notes each step of the cooking process, and uploads every­thing to the “iCook” website to share the new recipe with her Internet fans.

Although the dish’s aroma can’t be uploaded with the pictures, this online version of “making virtual friends with food” has created a range of business opportunities. It was this same creative concept that successfully raised the Japanese Internet firm Cook­pad to become a listed company.

iCook boasts 16,000 recipes in its archives, including Western and Chinese dishes. It has become Taiwan’s largest recipe sharing ­website.

Cook­pad, established in 1997, was the first recipe sharing website and is now Japan’s largest recipe site allowing visitors to upload and search through original recipes. However, a few years after its launch the company suffered when the dot-com bubble burst. After some hard times, Cook­pad is back, attracting 500 million visits monthly. In 2009, the firm went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and through a combination of advertising, members’ fees and online shopping revenue, took in about ¥2 billion in the first half of 2012.

Three young Taiwanese sensed the opportunity. Borrowing from the Japanese experience, in 2011 35-year-old Fox ­Hsiao with friends Lawrence Lin and Li Zhi­wei (both under 30) set up ­iCook. Their goal was to allow users to share recipes for popular dishes with guidance on where to buy ingredients. For over a year, 20-plus dishes have been appearing online each day with more than 100,000 members sharing their cooking skills.

­Hsiao, a graduate of National Tai­pei University’s Department of Cooperative Economics, says Taiwan is internationally renowned for its cuisines, but food articles on websites such as ­Yahoo!Kimo and Yam, and those by culinary bloggers, focus mainly on eating out, and pay scant attention to the joys of cooking at home. Yet TV cooking programs enjoy consistently high ratings, and the Eslite bookstore chain now has a special section for cookbooks. “All of this shows there is a huge market for cookery books and programs. Recipe sharing websites supplement all this interest and activity,” says ­Hsiao.

In order to integrate food culture into iCook’s management, its staff ­regularly receive instruction in cooking. iCook’s extensive recipe archive has also attracted investment from US-based software firm Evernote.

Before setting up iCook, ­Hsiao worked for a computer games company, also becoming involved with NHN Japan, which produced the popular social networking app LINE.

Another ­iCook co-founder, Lawrence Lin, studied in the Graduate Institute of Information Management Systems at National Cheng­chi University, and later worked as an engineer for smartphone maker HTC. Although ­iCook’s co-founders were all newbies to the kitchen, they are all in fact veterans of Internet technology.

When starting ­iCook, Hsiao didn’t go with the traditional strategy of creating a product, then selling it. Prior to the website’s launch, he set up a Face­book fan page and reproduced recipes and articles on food by other bloggers to establish his brand image.

In short order the site began attracting large numbers of visitors, but ­iCook wasn’t making any money. The firm had to push online marketing to increase their exposure before receiving their first income four months later.

Running a Facebook page, a blog, and a website, ­iCook has finally seen a sharp rise in the number of visits: in July of 2012 it had over 7 million hits for the month. For even a simple dish like fried rice, ­iCook can provide 1100 different recipes.

Culinary blogger Amy points out that Taiwanese love to experience foreign cultures by cooking exotic dishes at home, while for those living or studying abroad, being able to knock up Taiwanese snacks or hometown dishes is an important way to assuage homesickness. Trying out recipes isn’t just about food; it offers a cultural experience and a sense of accomplishment.

­Hsiao, also founder of Inside Forum, was initially thinking of setting up a financial website or a news channel. But with his many years of IT experience, he knew there was more to Internet success than high technology: fulfilling users’ needs is in fact the key to survival online.

His insights came from experience and keen observation. He knew that recipe sharing was common in Taiwan, but lacked the proper channel. The recipe sharing and search functions provided by ­iCook seem to have hit the spot in terms of market response.

 

With its distinctive positioning, ­iCook attracted the attention of food manufacturers such as Laurel Enterprises and Kik­ko­man who wanted to discuss cooperation, hold joint events, and get netizens involved in cooking programs.

Taking advantage of the opportunities to expand overseas by cooperating with global brands in the US, Japan and Korea, earlier this year ­iCook worked with Ra­ku­ten Inc., Japan’s largest e-commerce website, to provide online shopping services. In March, Korean technology giant Sam­sung also knocked on ­iCook’s door to manage the joint launch of an exclusive app.

Ever­note Food, a subsidiary of note­taking and archiving software producer Ever­note, also took a liking to iCook’s extensive recipe archive and sought the opportunity to work together. Ever­note Food’s Asia-Pacific marketing director Linda Kozlowski, noting that food plays a crucial part in Taiwanese culture, says the company began looking for Taiwanese partners to coincide with the launch of their Chinese-language website earlier this year, and ­iCook was the obvious choice.

Even earlier, in fact, Japanese venture capital firm Cyber­Agent invested in ­iCook at the end of October, 2012.

 

­iCook’s major revenue source is advertising, with a 2012 turnover of NT$5 million. Though the company still isn’t making a profit, ­Hsiao is confident it will break even in one to two years.

Hsiao actively brings a “culinary ambience” into management, spurning the normal office arrangements. Managers have titles derived from the traditional kitchen management system, such as master chef or pastry chef. Hsiao, for example, the de facto CEO, is known as “executive chef,” while Lin, in charge of software development, is known as “deputy kitchen chef.”

Accessing ­iCook’s website, one is presented with the company logo: a smiling pot with the Chinese character xin (“heart”) at its center. This represents the ­iCook philosophy—cooking with heart. Although there’s nothing especially original about a recipe website, ­iCook’s tech-savvy entrepreneurs have rewarmed this cold dish to make a tasty meal of novel commercial opportunities. Point, click, bon appétit!

In order to integrate food culture into iCook’s management, its staff ­regularly receive instruction in cooking. iCook’s extensive recipe archive has also attracted investment from US-based software firm Evernote.

 

Each time she finishes preparing a new dish, popular Internet chef Lina uploads pictures and the recipe to the iCook website to share with her followers.