Based on our insights from our user research, we listed the key desired features and functionalities of a cooking website and we conducted a Competitive Evaluation to analyze the missing components from the existing websites. This was a key step in our research as it helped us focus on the areas of improvement in order to provide the user with a holistic cooking experience.
We looked at three cooking websites (viz., Epicurious, FoodNetwork and VegWeb) and the Whole Foods iPhone app as a part of our competitive evaluation. Our evaluation showed us that these services focus on the following features–

Finding recipes Saving recipes Rating recipes Meal planning Filtering

Often used features

Commenting Social networking

Rarely used features

Detailed analysis of each of the websites and key observations can be seen here.