A One-Stop Cooking and E-Commerce Site Heats Up Food52 is both a curated cooking site and an online shop for kitchen and home goods.

What It Is
New York City-based Food52.com launched in 2009 as a crowdsourced and curated food and cooking site with a decidedly stylish and sophisticated flair. This past August, the company started Food52's Provisions, an online shop for kitchen and home goods, cookware and special ingredients needed to create recipes found on the site.

How It Started
Former New York Times Magazine food writer and editor Amanda Hesser and freelance food writer and recipe developer Merrill Stubbs launched Food52 with the goal of creating a beautiful curated site where users could crowdsource recipes (23,000 so far) and share information. With the Provisions store, they promote "Collections"--themed groupings of feature stories, recipes and products for sale that range from kombucha to corn tortillas.

Why It Took Off
Popular writers Hesser and Stubbs had a built-in following. Food52 attracts upward of 1.9 million unique visitors each month, while a small army of "Provisions Scouts" share their product finds on Pinterest Provisions boards. Those boards are "the first place we look" when planning future collections, Hesser says.