Gilt Groupe launched their new online culinary magazine, Gilt Taste — sans advertisements — on Wednesday, May 18th.  The company hopes to make it a leading food magazine.  Gourmet Editor-in-Chief, Ruth Reichl, is serving as editorial advisor for the new Gilt venture.  With a great vision and experts on board, Gilt Groupe hopes that this site will be another recipe for success.

Gilt Taste will include tested recipes, beautiful photography and articles about the sourcing, politics and creation of food from around the world.  However, Gilt Groupe strives to be different by making their magazine an ad-free one — and if anyone has the money to go ad-free, it’s Gilt, the $1 billion dollar company.

“The content on the site is built around a catalog of products, from rare kinds of meat and seafood to specialized produce and equipment, which Gilt plans to sell to an affluent readership.”

Gilt Groupe Chairman and CEO Susan Lyne says, ”This is our first true merger of content and commerce, It’s something we’ve been talking about a lot, and we’re convinced that the two big rivers of the Internet — content and commerce — are moving together.”

Gilt Taste is in essence an online market that helps shoppers obtain direct access to artisan products and ingredients that have only been available to professional chefs until now.  The new site allows visitors to connect with farmers who offer insight on where the food was grown and how to prepare it for the best results.  It will surely be interesting to see how this new Gilt venture performs.