Case Study: Allrecipes achieves personalized recipe recommendations and higher engagement with Microsoft Azure

Top cooking website energizes a new generation of cooks with personalized recommendations

Allrecipes.com, a Seattle-based media site and the world’s largest food-focused social network with 19 sites and more than 350 million recipes, reviews, profiles, and photos, relaunched in 2015 to become an omnichannel, social food network. The company faced the challenge of surfacing the most relevant content from its vast dataset and delivering a highly personalized, mobile-first experience for a growing Millennial audience while integrating data across multiple platforms.

Allrecipes implemented a recommendation engine using Microsoft Azure, the Cortana Intelligence Suite, the Cognitive Services Recommendations API, and Azure Machine Learning Studio, integrating with AWS and on‑premises systems. The solution delivers real-time, tailored recipe recommendations (plus shopping lists and local retailer suggestions) to millions of visitors, supporting peak traffic of about 80 million unique visitors and driving toward more than a billion annual page views—boosting site stickiness, improving the mobile experience for Millennials, and positioning the company for higher advertising revenue and continued personalization enhancements.

Allrecipes

Esmee Williams

Vice President, Brand Strategy