Why Does 52 Bury CPs List When Contest Finalists Are Announced?

For CP news, I just click on "Contests"; then I look to the lower left of the screen for either the recipes to be tested, or, later in the contest cycle, for the CPs.

Re. not enough testers: sometimes having a contest around or during a holiday might prevent or discourage testing. The current contest is an example since it is being held during Passover, and the length of the holiday as well as its dietary restrictions might keep some from participating. It might be helpful to extend deadlines sometimes.

Hi all,

Thanks as always for your feedback. We know the contest system is a bit frustrating and difficult to navigate right now—we're working on ways to improve it!

I want to reassure you that we're certainly not trying to bury the Community Picks—we're really proud of and excited about the recipes chosen as CPs! But we are posting more stories more frequently and can understand how that can make finding the results challenging. AJ's tip is a good one in a pinch! (We also announce the CPs at the same time—2 PM—every other Friday; in the days that follow, the CP recipes circle through our homepage as recipe tiles as well.) But as we work to make our contests more navigable, this is definitely something we'll keep in mind. Thank you!

With regard to why not all recipes nominated as Community Picks candidates, this is unfortunately due to our simply not having enough testers. We would love to be able to test them all! (Tell your friends! The more testers we have, the better.) And we read every recipe that is submitted to the contests: A few editors including myself, our head recipe tester Stephanie, and a handful of other recipe testers read through every recipe submitted; as to why there are sometimes "0 views" is a great question, and a possible bug—I've asked our Product team to investigate.

Here is a video we did all the way back in 2011 about how exactly our contests work. The process is almost exactly the same (except we now have a test kitchen chef cooking the recipes and a photo studio to photograph them in, instead of A&M cooking all of the recipes and shooting them on Amanda's bedside table): https://food52.com/blog/2734-behind-the-scenes-of-food52-s-recipe-contests

The best tool for finding anything buried on Food52 (or that you otherwise can't find using their search box . . . same thing) is simply to go to Google. It's been my workaround of choice since Day 1.

To find community testing opportunities for any contest, search in Google as follows: "food52+community+picks+recipe+tester+best+ [fill in, e.g., "jewish inspired")." That search gave me this link, which took me right to the community testing page: https://www.google.com/search?q=food52+community+picks+recipe+tester+best+jewish+inspired+recipe&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari
Google is such a great resource, having made good progress, if I may say so, in fulfilling its mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Hope this helps. ;o)

This has been often requested. Just so you know.

One other thing that I've wondered about...I've seen one of my recipes be selected for testing, but it seems like no one picks it to test because no tester notes appear. If no one picks it to test, I'm assuming the recipe can't make it to the finalist stage. Maybe they need to add more time?

I've never really understood how the contests work, selection criteria, etc....for a long time, this kept me from entering, but I eventually figured, why not? Embrace the mystery ;)

But it does seem very counterproductive to let the call for recipe testers for CP's and finalists get buried...I just now dug down and saw the short list for "Jewish Inspired" (yay! one of mine is on there, but I could easily have missed it.) While actively seeking testers, wouldn't it be smarter to keep at least that pinned at the top?

As it was explained to me by a Food52 staffer, the "community" in CPs is the Food52 staff, NOT the members/users. We members are invited to help test recipes once the field is winnowed down, and then to vote once the two finalists are announced. That's it. I find searching for various parts of the contests to be very difficult and unintuitive.

I also find the process confusing. I'd rather they 'post dates' than 'days' as the time-line.