02 December 2011

BEIRUT: Looking for that perfect kibbeh recipe like your mom used to make? Find it with ease at the Lebanese web startup shahiya.com – an online tool for recipe sharing in the Middle East.

Shahiya.com is the brainchild of three AUB graduates who, since meeting at university, have lived abroad and returned to Lebanon after encountering the same problem: how to find excellent, home-cooked Lebanese cuisine outside Lebanon.

“When we had to cook something, we had to call our mothers,” says Carole Makhoul Hani, one of the three founders and an experienced nutritionist. “You couldn’t just eat out all the time. It never tastes the way things taste at home.”

Hani, along with partners Hala Labaki and Daniel Neuwirth, launched the full version of the website in May 2010 with both Arabic and English versions. Currently, the Arabic site, which is the more active of the two, has 35,000 registered members as a part of an online community that Hani likens to “Facebook for cooking.”

“Users subscribe for free to the website, they become members and so they can enter their own recipes and this is how we made our database of about 3,000 recipes which are 100 percent user-generated,” explains Hani, adding that shahiya.com’s content team monitors the submitted recipes to ensure they are understandable and contain all the necessary information to cook the meals.

“It’s interactive in the sense that not only do the users submit their own recipes but they comment on other’s recipes and other people comment on theirs. That’s why it’s a social platform,” Hani says. “This is what attracts users, the fact that they’re not just reading a recipe book, they’re being part of it.”

Recipes are organized by meal, type of cuisine or categories such as “chicken” or “sweets.” Users can also search for the top-rated recipes by members in each section. The site also features discussion forums for members as well as a health and diet section run by Hani with nutrition advice, assessments of recipes and diet meals.

The site is unique, Hani believes, because it is the first to generate so much content specifically from users in the Middle East in Arabic.

“All other cuisines all have Internet sources that are reliable and dependable, whereas for Lebanese you wouldn’t find such a resource ... especially online and in the Arabic language.”

The recipes are not exclusively Lebanese – most of shahiya.com’s members are from Saudi Arabia. Lebanese are the second-largest group of members followed by Egyptians.

Creating an online community for Arab foodies has not come without challenges. “Being an online entrepreneur is extremely more complicated in this area of the world in general, especially in Lebanon,” Hani says, citing a lack of awareness regarding online businesses and a small pool of experienced online professionals with technical expertise.

“When we tell people what we’re doing they’ll say, ‘OK, so you have a website,’ but that’s work! I don’t just have Facebook page, it’s a business. Even to get funding sometimes we had to explain that this is a model that actually can be revenue generating. Why do you understand how TV [makes money] and not a website?”

Hani’s partner, Labaki, agrees: “We had a lot of challenges to face. One of them was the infrastructure of the country, and we’re talking two years ago. We are very happy to have faster Internet but even now we’re not there.”

The small team of 10 staff at shahiya.com has pushed through these challenges to even expand their concept into mobile applications. Last August for Ramadan, the website launched a mobile app called “Cook Lebanese” available to download from iTunes in six languages – Arabic, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and German.

The app includes “101 quintessential Lebanese recipes,” identified and tested by the shahiya.com team. The idea behind the application as opposed to the website is to have go-to, guaranteed recipes that have each been vetted and tasted.

“These are the must-know or must-discover of the Lebanese cuisine and we cooked them all as a team,” Labaki reports proudly, with Hani adding that each recipe went through “a panel of everyone’s mothers and families” for approval.

In the mobile application, each recipe has a photo, a brief description, calorie count, list of ingredients and instructions. Users can also save and share their favorites. The free version of the app has been downloaded 130,000 times and received great reviews inside Lebanon and abroad.

“We’re hearing from people in Europe saying ‘at least now I can make a kibbeh, I’ve never known how,’ and now we have a very simple way of explaining it, a guaranteed way of cooking it,” Labaki says.

Copyright The Daily Star 2011.