Recipe import from recipezaar.com, allrecipes.com, etc.

I eat a lot of foods I prepare from recipes on recipezaar and allrecipes. It would be great to have an import feature that is similar to social-networking sites where you can enter your authentication information and import contacts from gmail, yahoo!, hotmail, etc. Instead, you would be importing recipe books from sites like these. At first glance, however, those recipe sites don’t have an API. But perhaps this could be a partnership opportunity…

Hey annalissac,

That’s a cool idea. We would like to form a partnership with some of the top-notch food sites out there (we’ve discussed opportunities with at least one of them). Let us know if you come across any APIs also!

I would like to write an importer, and I think it could be done similarly to how Springpad does it.

Using the DB API, it wouldn’t be too hard to match up ingredients to existing foods (though it might require a manual review by the user) but I’m not seeing any way in the API to create a recipe.

Would it be possible to add an API function similar to “foods/add_favorite” that takes food IDs and servings as arguments to create a recipe for a user?

Allrecipes has complete nutrition stats listed at the ./Nutrition.aspx page:

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Roasted-Garlic-Lem…

The normal page for a recipe (the link people would provide for an import) is ./Detail.aspx:

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Roasted-Garlic-Lem…

By simply replacing Detail with Nutrition, you can get the page you want.

This information is fairly neatly wrapped in a div with an id of “nutritiontable”. So while it’s not a true api or even XML, it’s definitely something you can work with fairly easily.