I have a question about the new contest format.

Another factor is recipes that are saved, but not commented upon. I save recipes all the time but hardly ever leave a comment. I notice that people I follow do that as well. Shouldn't amount of saves come into play for a recipe that is submitted for a contest? And if recipes are not commented upon how is it that they are chosen as finalists? I thought both finalists created great recipes, but where is the disconnect?

I confess I often look at all the contest entries, take ideas from some, comment on non-popular others, have used a number of those. Having all those eliminated without us browsing is too bad. I assume it is a formatting and posting issue for an employee, and not a wise allocation of time? Also, maybe having ten is better than two, and also, being precise about comments etc works. Mind, I am fond of food52.

I also did not see anything about comments being taken into account.

I didn’t see anything about making comments either. Gave many ❤️‘s.

Many saved my Chocolate Bananas Peanut Butter, Oh My! One comment ‘Yum’ from SexyLambChop....I feel like a winner! 😄

Hi June—thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. It was important to us to be able to bring back the contests, but we needed to rework the format to make them more manageable and successful to execute on our end. We put a lot of thought and care into considering each submission—and testing lots of them, too. And we absolutely want the community to be involved with that piece, too—narrowing down the entries isn't easy and we're counting on the community's input! The system has changed, so instead of emailing us your thoughts (and only allowing a limited number of community members to claim a recipe), we're asking community members to share their thoughts in the comments of the recipes, ideally upping the community participation! That feedback is taken into consideration, along with the results of our testing, when we narrow it down to the top-five recipes. Those are considered community picks and we give them a shoutout in an article on the site. From there we take the community's comments into account, along with our team's opinions on our in-office taste test to narrow it down to the final two, which then, as you mentioned, the community has the final say on. Hope this helps clarify and please feel free to reach out to me directly with any more thoughts or Qs.