We're honored to be finalists in the Mirassou Winery Bright Ideas Contest!

The Mirassou Winery is awarding $20,000 in grants to promote entrepreneurism, innovation, and empowerment. In April, the winery invited entrepreneurs to submit descriptions of their Bright Ideas on their Facebook page for a chance to win funds to further their businesses. In November, five finalists,  each awarded $3,000, were announced. We're honored to be among them and to have a chance at the $5,000 national prize!

I found out about the program in May during the Eat Write Retreat food blogger conference when Liz Conant, a representative from the winery, and I were sitting at the same table at McCormick and Schmick's for lunch. After I told her a little bit about Feastie, she encouraged me to enter the contest. At the time, Feastie was still a shopping list tool with coupons and a blog with just a few entries. Feastie has come a long way since then and is still moving fast. When I submitted our entry in October, we had recently launched our recipe search engine with about 10,000 recipes from 50 food blogs. Today, we have about 50,000 recipes from over 200 food blogs, with new recipes added as they are posted throughout the day.

Why should we win the national prize? In short, we know exactly how we will make the prize money go a long way -- our plan leverages our uniqueness  to create the most benefit for home cooks like you. More specifically, we have the technology to index recipes from food blogs and sites without requiring special formatting or codes in a manner that is cheap, fast, and works automatically for most food blogs. So with $8000 from Mirassou Winery, we will index one million recipes from thousands of food blogs. This will make it possible for home cooks to use an advanced recipe search engine to find delicious recipes from a wider variety of sources than ever before. It will also benefit food bloggers by making their recipes more discoverable and interactive.

You can help us make this happen! Please vote for Feastie on the Mirassou Winery Facebook page. You can vote every day until December 4th. We're so excited to have this opportunity and we'd greatly appreciate your help in taking Feastie to the next level.