BiteClub COO Randy Paragary (left) and CEO Sonny Mayugba say their site aims to link people working in the restaurant industry.

“Passion” is a word commonly associated with the food industry. It’s no surprise Jon Anthony Yongfook started his social networking site Opensourcefood.com (OSF) a year ago this March based on his passion for food, particularly its visual appeal.

The son of two cooks, Yongfook was talking on the phone with his dad about the lack of visually appealing recipe-sharing Web sites. Why not make a recipe-networking site – chock-full of beautiful food photos – they’d want to join?

“I, myself, am really passionate about food and cooking, so I just ran with the idea,” the site’s founder and Web producer says. “About two weeks later, I had built the first incarnation of Opensourcefood.com.

“The goal has not changed since launching – I wanted to build up a community of great contributors and content, with a strong focus on visuals,” he says. “For me, photos and recipes go hand-in-hand, so from the very beginning, to contribute a recipe on OSF, you had to have a picture of it. I was never interested in building up a huge monolithic database of hundreds of thousands of picture-less recipes, which would be easier to do.”

Yongfook relied largely on viral marketing – the equivalent of online word-of-mouth – to stir interest in his site. The new site caught the attention from Australian celebrity chef Benjamin Christie’s Web site, www.benjaminchristie.com, as well as others.

Today, OSF has more than 3,000 registered members. OSF receives around 350,000 page views a month from a wide variety of countries – mostly America and the U.K., but there is also a strong Asian presence from countries such as Singapore and Malaysia.

“The most popular contributors are women,” he says. “Although there are some members who work with food in a professional capacity, most are just like me – passionate about cooking, with many who have amazing photographic skills, too.  The top contributors on OSF mostly have those two things in common – a love of food and an eye for visual details.”

What makes Yongfook a true “walk-the-talk” business leader is that he, too, is part of OSF’s online community, and has seen first-hand the benefits of the network.

“The most important benefit is being part of a really engaged community – one that is mad about food and cooking,” he says. “I’ve made a lot of new connections from posting my recipes on OSF, and I’ve collected way more comments and words of praise on my recipes on OSF than I would have if I was just sharing them on my personal blog – it’s all about the audience and the community.”

These networking sites also offer opportunities for advertisers. Yongfook looked no further than his kitchen drawers for potential sponsors. “Picking candidates for the first round of ad inventory was easy – I just looked at my kitchen,” he relates.

Kitchenware companies OXO International and Alessi are current advertisers, and he hopes to continue this trend because it makes sense. The majority of the site’s visitors are already “engaged with the idea of cooking and improving their skills,” Yongfook says. “Providing links to useful or stylish cooking tools is of mutual benefit to the visitors and advertisers. It’s a no-brainer.”

For OSF, the future is as bright off-line as it is on. Yongfook is already planning a print and e-book made up of top contributors’ best recipes.

“It’s going to be a new kind of recipe book – one that is written by different people from all over the world; a compilation of the best recipes so far,” he says.

What differentiates this from the standard cookbook is there are no celebrity chefs, no famous names and no faceless corporations behind them. These are real recipes from real food enthusiasts who are part of the OSF community.

Yongfook thinks people will find a deeper connection to the cooks as regular people with different backgrounds and day jobs. “I think it’s going to add a nice human touch to the whole idea of recipe books,” he says. “I’ll be including [each cooks’] back-story, too.  It’s going to be really interesting to get a snapshot into the lives of people who can successfully balance cooking great food with time-consuming activities such as running a business and raising families.”  In addition, all profits from book sales will be donated to a food-related charity.

‘By You, For You, About You’
FohBoh.com, which launched earlier this year, includes members from the front of the house (Foh) to the back of the house (Boh), it also links corporate employees, suppliers, service providers, growers and artists, designers and architects.
    
Today, it has 3,300 members with more than 200,000 page views per month. “We are for industry insiders,” founder Michael Atkinson explains. “We designed FohBoh to enable [users] to network, connect and socialize with other like-minded industry professionals worldwide and communicate with the companies that support [their] business.”

Having grown up in Silicon Valley and with more than 30 years of restaurant industry experience, “it occurred to me that vertical, or ‘niche’ social networks had a place,” Atkinson says. “I also studied the key success attributes of a social network and researched the science and technology behind them.”

He discovered that there was a lack of social networking sites with user-generated content.  In November 2007, he and co-founder Ted Cohn set out to differentiate their site – FohBoh – by carving out a niche in the restaurant industry.

“The restaurant industry [is] a big enough niche and there was no direct competitive analog to a business-to-business restaurant social network,” Atkinson says. “I don’t know of any other restaurant-centric business-to-business social network like FohBoh. We’re ‘By you, for you and about you.’”

The restaurant industry in particular is a good candidate for its own networking sites because “restaurant people are naturally social and a Web site can offer a way to connect, communicate and affect business globally,” he says. “Restaurant operators worldwide have the same challenges but may have unique solutions to share.” A FohBoh member since January, Amanda Hite says she uses social networking as a way to build new and maintain old relationships in her professional network.

“It’s also a great source for sharing best practices,” says Hite, the director of training and development for Thomas & King, a restaurant franchise company. “My professional network has doubled since I’ve been on the site and I’ve reunited with old contacts. FohBoh has made these relationships easy to maintain.”

In addition to re-establishing relationships, Hite has started three groups within FohBoh: Leading Generation Y, Thomas & King and National Speakers Association. “Within these groups, I am able to share ideas and build people resources with people that share the same career interest I do,” she says. “ Within [my company’s group], I am able to solicit feedback from our associates. Managers leave me their thoughts and ideas about the things we are doing with everything from campaigns to projects.

“I’ve used the site as a recruiting tool and have been approached to be recruited, so obviously it can be used for career advancement,” she adds.

For the future, FohBoh continues promoting and marketing its young site. The site continually adds features to further engage its users, such as a job board, events calendar and a chat function.

Hite says she particularly enjoys earning “points” for community participation and activity. With rewards points, members can show off their contribution level and can redeem them for shadow stock in FohBoh and future gifts that are to be determined. “Stock was a brilliant idea on FohBoh’s part to grow membership,” Hite says. “I have had a blast recruiting members and [have] 100,000 [points].”

But its efforts don’t end online. FohBoh recently announced a bus tour. “We want to make a splash and visit cities across the nation to find, experience, report on and promote the best restaurants, wineries, breweries and festivals,” the site says. “Our staff will interview owners, chefs, FohBoh members, sommeliers, brewmasters and sample food. We’ll be online and plugged in to post photos, videos and blogs daily.”

Bites and Bytes
Bite Club and Paragary Restaurant Group (PRG) (Sept./Oct. ‘07) co-founder and COO Randy Paragary wasted little time to get into the food and beverage industry. He opened his first establishment, a bar named Parapow Palace, in Sacramento, Calif., at the age of 22 in 1969. In 1974, he opened his first restaurant named The Arbor, an Italian eatery. Today, PRG operates 10 locations, including Paragary’s Bar and Oven, three Café Bernardo locations, Esquire Grill, Spataro Restaurant and Bar, Blue Cue Billiards, Centro Cocina Mexicana and R15. In 2007, he set his sights on a different kind of real estate with BiteClub.com: the World Wide Web.

“[Bite Club serves as a space] where servers, chefs and bartenders have a chance to communicate, and as an opportunity for businesses to create profiles,” Paragary says. “BiteClub appeals to four distinct audiences that share a similar passion for food and beverage: restaurant and bar workers, foodservice vendors, culinary students and foodies.”

BiteClub.com has everything the most popular social networking sites have, including blogs, forums and event announcements. A job bank allows job hunters and seekers to post information to others in the industry.

“When I was just starting out in the restaurant industry, word of mouth was the primary means of connecting with my peers,” he says. “Getting information today is not only much easier, it is more comprehensive and has a global view. [For the food industry, it’s] a great resource for those looking for an insider view of the restaurant and bar culture and a wealth of information on the industry's best-kept secrets, nuances and quirks.”

The idea came to Paragary and partners CEO and co-founder Sonny Mayugba, Webmaster Mark Braden and Director of Development Darius Anderson during a conversation about how helpful a social networking site based on the restaurant industry would be.

“Sonny brought the idea before me in July 2006, and by November, we were working on bringing the concept to life,” Paragary recalls. “The live beta site launched May 29, 2007, and our custom-developed platform you see today went live on Feb. 20, 2008.”

“The restaurant industry is built by cool, creative people,” Mayugba adds. “This is a place where they can express themselves. Once they are done serving or cooking, they have a whole life. Here, they can connect professionally and express themselves personally.”

In April, Bite Club expects to host launch parties throughout the United States in cities where dining out is a priority, according to Paragary.

In addition, “We are working to produce original series video content, which is an exciting venture, Paragary says.  

“We are also working diligently to continue to grow the Bite Club community, grow the content on the site, and continue to bridge the divide and bring people together [by] having [these parties] and [getting] a buzz going,” he adds.