Specialty food retailer Dean & Deluca has been named exclusive e-commerce partner for CondeNet’s Epicurious.com, a food destination site that is also online home to Gourmet and Bon Apetit magazines.
The alliance will Epicurious will direct users looking at a recipe to buy the ingredients off the site through deandeluca.com. New York-based Dean & Deluca will be responsible for merchandising, fulfillment and customer service. Epicurious gets a cut of all sales made via its site.
“This is a follow-up on the strategy to get the best possible upscale specialty retailers as e-commerce partners for the food site,” said George H. Simpson, spokesman for Epicurious, alluding to the deal Epicurious inked last fall with Williams-Sonoma for home and kitchen products.
Epicurious claimed 2.2 million visits to its site in December, mostly from women interested in food research, presentation or preparation. Traffic on the site between January and December of last year doubled each month, the company said. The average user visits 10 times per month. Each visit lasts 32 minutes.
The close relationship with New York publisher Conde Nast’s Gourmet and Bon Apetit titles allows Epicurious to include over 10,000 recipes on its site, 70 percent of which are claimed to have been reviewed by users. Over 152,000 users have registered to open personalized recipe boxes on the site.
