Web site has ingredients for good eating

Company: Recipezaar, www.recipezaar.com

Founded: October 1999; originally launched as Cookpoint.com

What it does: Lets users share recipes and create collections online. The service is free and supported by advertising.

Key executives: Chief Executive Gay Gilmore, 34, spent four years at Adobe Systems and six years at Microsoft. "Tech Guy" Troy Hakala, 34, worked as a programmer in the Washington, D.C., area before starting at Microsoft in 1996.

Employees: Gilmore, Hakala and a customer-support employee in Colorado.

History: Gilmore and Hakala met at Microsoft working on Outlook and quit to start Recipezaar in 1999. "We realized the power of the Internet for sharing information, and we wanted to do something in that space," Gilmore said via e-mail. "We hit upon recipes as something that people have exchanged for centuries."

Taste the tech: Gilmore said that when chefs look at recipes, they can taste the food. But when she and Hakala look at a recipe, "we see incredibly structured information that we should put in a database and start forming a neural network with."

Secret sauce: Recipezaar's software allows members to type recipes in any format. It uses the content to form a database and does nutritional analysis on the recipe automatically. The site also has powerful searching mechanisms and the ability to predict which recipes would attract users based on others they have liked.

Personal: Gilmore and Hakala were married in July and work in an office — shared with two Labrador retrievers — above their garage on Vashon Island.

Backers: Entirely self-funded.

Mission: Build the world's smartest cookbook and largest cooking community.

Site stats: Has more than 96,000 recipes and grows by about 80 recipes a day.

Outlook: Gilmore said they've survived the dot-com crash, and the advertising market has rebounded. "We are profitable," she said. "By staying small and self-funded, we were able to survive while many competitors failed."

Business growth: The site has just launched a premium membership program offering special features for an annual fee. The company also licenses content and functionality to grocery stores, fitness companies and others.

Vision: "We believe that Recipezaar will fundamentally change the cooking industry and bring it into the 21st century," Gilmore said.

Most popular recipe: Changes often; last week it was "Simple Tomato Sandwich."

Favorite food: "Sushi? Everyone thinks we must be these amazing cooks to run a recipe Web site," Gilmore said. "We'd hoped it would improve our cooking skills, but mostly we've been too busy working on the site to cook much."

— Brier Dudley