Smartphones aren’t just for reading books anymore–publishers can team up with new companies to build new kinds of reading experiences.
Food52 built a cookbook from scratch using recommended recipes from a community of readers. The community submitted and voted on their favorite recipes for the final cookbook–crowdsourcing the writing process.
Now the crowdsourced cookbook makers have teamed up with Stickybits, an innovative company that allows people to link media to barcodes on products. Smartphone users with the Stickybits application can then scan the barcode and access the attached media.
Here’s how it works, from the release: “Food52’s founders, Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, recently rounded up a bunch of volunteers to scan hundreds of bar codes on ingredients in grocery stores across New York City, and then to link food52 recipes to those bar codes. Now, any shopper in America can find recipes by simply downloading the StickyBits application and scanning an ingredient’s bar code with his or her iPhone. For instance, all boxes of Domino light brown sugar now have a food52 chocolate espresso cookie recipe attached to them, and every DeCecco spaghetti box boasts a carbonara recipe.”