Cooking.com gets $7 million in financing

Cooking.com Inc., an e-retailer offering kitchen and other housewares products across six web sites, has received $7 million in financing from ORIX Venture Finance to expand operations and develop community content and private label products, Cooking.com said today.

“We are very excited about establishing a long-term relationship with ORIX and believe the company will be the ideal financing partner to help us achieve our growth goals in 2008 and beyond,” says Tracy Randall, founder and president of Cooking.com. The retailer, No. 178 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, operates the retail web sites Cooking.com, FoodNetworkStore.com, StarbucksStore.com, KitchenEtc.com, PillsburyStore.com and BettyCrockerStore.com.

The retailer says it will use the financing to improve its community content, such as the discussion forum on Cooking.com, as well as to expand overall operations and support continued acceleration of its private-label product development, which will add to its current base of more than 90,000 products.