• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 2, 2011

Food, the most social category in the physical world, continues to lack the same experience online -- at least until now. Foodily.com, run by Yahoo veterans, will launch a series of tools Wednesday to make the online food experience more social.

The tools will allow searchers to compare millions of options similar to browsing a cookbook or magazine, help people decide the recipes by attaching them to social networks and address the most frequently asked question: "What should we eat?"

Social tools will not only tell you the number of veggie burger recipes on the site, but the number of varieties. Enter the keyword "chicken" into the search box, hit the return key and the site serves up a list of 71,972 recipes pulled from across the Web, for example. The recipes come with color photos, ingredients, ratings from source sites, cooking times, and more.

For those planning a Super Bowl party or Valentine's Day event, the social tools will allow searchers to make a menu and create a Facebook event to share the meal with friends and family. While an "X" lets searchers close the recipe box, a heart allows searchers to add the recipe to a sharable menu, as well as through a Facebook event.

The recipe list becomes a social experience by attaching to friends and family in the searcher's social network, according to Andrea Cutright, Foodily CEO and co-founder. "It makes ratings part of the social conversation, rather than leaving them anonymous," she says. "Your friends should share in this social food experience."

Cutright estimates Americans spend about $1 trillion on food annually. She says the site plans to offer coupons. "Looking down the road at monetization, we will add value by through coupons," she says, calling coupons "a time-based ad with real value attached."

The social tools -- which folks like Vanessa Druckman at Chefdruck Musings and Sean Timberlake at Punk Domestics have been testing -- will enable searchers to see the recipes friends "Like," sharing them in Facebook, Twitter or email. Eventually, the share features will link back to the originating Web site. They also will provide other options -- matching foods, for example.

Down the product road map, searchers also can expect Foodily to offer "grocer availability" related to ingredients in recipes, as well as health data and a mobile application that matches circular data with ingredients available in stores.

Foodily raised $5 million in a round led by Index Ventures last year.