Whirlpool Buys Recipe Search Engine Yummly

The Whirlpool Corporation, the world’s largest home appliance maker, has acquired Yummly, a visual and semantic recipe search engine and aggregator.

According to TechCrunch, Yummly allows its 20 million users to create shopping lists and (in some locations) order food for delivery and equipment to make a meal. The site was last valued at $100 million in 2015.

Terms of the deal, which will close later this month, were not disclosed. Publicly traded Whirlpool is a $14 billion business with revenues last year of $20.7 billion. It said the deal would have no material impact. Yummly plans to stay in its offices in Redwood City, California, operating as a subsidiary of Whirlpool.

“We look forward to the many possibilities to create value for our consumers with this acquisition,” said Joseph Liotine, president of Whirlpool North America.

For Whirlpool, the acquisition is just one step the company has taken over the years to make innovative products for current and next-generation consumer cooks. Most recently, it’s been making appliances for the kitchen of the future, including smart sensors that can detect what item you put on a counter to tell you what to do with it, cook it for you and even clean up the dirty dishes you leave in the sink.

It’s also been an early partner of companies like Amazon and IBM as they have all sought more endpoints for their own IoT and connected home technologies. Yummly can help extend the kinds of services that Whirlpool can offer in that context, or it can simply be a standalone sales channel.

“We are committed to introducing new products to market that remove complexity from the day-to-day lives of consumers. Increasingly, these products will be defined by both physical and digital experiences. Yummly brings an outstanding platform on which to begin building our digital product offering,” said Brett Dibkey, vice president, Integrated Business Units for Whirlpool Corporation, in a statement.