Pinterest Acquires Punchfork

Pinterest, the photo and information sharing pinboard site, has recently acquired Punchfork. The online recipe, food blogger and social cooking website was created about 2 years ago by founder Jeff Miller and brings a visual Pinterest experience.  Punchfork is linkable with many social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter which enables you to share some of your favorite recipes.  This site allows you to find a vast amount of recipes and inspires a unique creativity in cooking some of your favorite culinary dishes.

Punchfork

Punchfork users have the option to search by category, what’s trending, what’s new, top rated recipes or by simply searching recipes by what ingredients you may have in your refrigerator or pantry.  There are also dietary specific recipes and many vegetarian and vegan options available.  This site has the same look and feel of Pinterest with grid style icons that are visually eye catching, cooking inspired and are engaging to the users’ senses. Recipe pins were already one of the most popular pins within the Pinterest community, so the purchase was a no-brainer.

M&A

This is the first additional site purchased by the evolving, discovery website, Pinterest. However, the price of the website purchase is undisclosed. Punchfork will continue on for only a short time before its site, API, and mobile app close. Pinterest will take over from there with the help of Punchfork’s developer and CEO, Jeff Miller, as he joins the Pinterest Engineering team.

Pinterest was one of the fastest growing web sites of 2012 and has recently received over $138 million in assets from a variety of investment partners.  They have linked some of the best and most popular recipes from many well-liked websites on the net.

Since Pinterest hit the scene and started gaining popularity and accomplishment, loads of new photo sharing and discovery sites have tried to emulate it. Now that Pinterest has taken up a new strategy with dealing in mergers and aquistions, time will tell how many of the other copycat sites it will attain.

[Images via pleoblogdotcom & writinghomedearmom]