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They call them the new domains for foodies: domain names, a website's extension in letters, dedicated entirely to food and wine enthusiasts. Food bloggers, restaurateurs, owners of bars and bistros, or maybe those who are passionate about coffee, wine and organic products, even skilled and attentive producers or pizza makers. For a few months now, they've had new suffixes available to them, with the most popular and in demand are those ending in .Coffee, .Kitchen, .Pizza, .Recipes, .Restaurant, .Catering, .Wine, .Beer, .Menu and .Organic.
WAITING FOR .FOOD
Soon, however, more will come from the generic .Food (not yet available), with a single and important purpose: to recognize a professional on the internet at first glance, or a site run by experts in the food and wine sectors. The question is legitimate: were the old .com and .net not enough? No. Or rather, not anymore, because consistency is demanded from the restaurateur as concerns that presented on the menu and the food served on the plate. Equally transparent information is requested on the net: users search information, a suggestion - and already create an opinion based on the site's name. This is valid in the fashion and luxury sectors, and even more so in the food and wine sector where quality and reliability are key and intrinsic features of the service.
On the web, a website is equivalent to a business card, or the sign over the store. As such, more and more attention is paid to a site's web address. In this context, since 2013, ICANN, the international body tasked to coordinate the management of certain internet services, has decided to release a number of new extensions such as the large family of .Kitchen and the like. Among the reasons, there is also one linked to the short supply of .com domains, as well as a technical trick: to be found in the search engines, particularly Google, the rule is to offer a higher keyword density, and having a keyword related to your industry that is already in the site's extension is a way to gain further hits.
What's Happening in Italy and France
Technicalities aside, the sectorial domain name has already become an important piece of technology. In Italy, one of the most important wine consortia that has international visibility, Prosecco, has just decided to register a .Bio domain (the Italian translation of "organic") to protect its brand and strengthen the link between the product and the unique concept of organic production. Many other large companies are following, each in its own field. Another case in point is the domain .Pizza, which despite having a very Italian name and soul, "Neapolitan pizza", lends itself to being rather widespread throughout the world, and due to the international nature of this dish, to be used outside of Italy's borders. Although it is still early to understand what the future holds for these domains, their debut has been very positive and transversal: they have already been chosen by small local neighborhood restaurants as well as large ones, cooking schools and caterers, street food vendors and food producers. In Italy, where the subject of food is now in the spotlight thanks to Expo Milano 2015, the .bio domain became the fourth TLD (Top Level Domain) in 2015, the most sold in the span of just a few months (after .com, .net and .it). In France, the and the .vin and .wine domains have become the symbol of authenticity and uniqueness of the nectar of the gods - wine - and fight against forgery.
