Buy your .food domain today

.food domains suit businesses whose subject is food itself rather than one place to eat it. Producers, packaged brands, delivery and meal-kit services, caterers, food halls, markets, recipe publishers and nutrition sites all fit.

The breadth is the point. A restaurant is a venue, and there are extensions that say so, but a business that sells sauce in shops, runs a stall at weekends and ships nationwide is not a venue, and .food describes it without pinning it down.

It is also the natural choice for editorial. A recipe site, a food magazine or a review project has no premises to name, and an address ending in .food explains the subject before anyone reads a word.

Yes, .food is open to the public and has been since March 2024. The confusion is understandable, because for years it was not.

The extension was delegated in 2016 to a company connected to a US media group, and then simply never brought to market. It sat unavailable for around seven years. A different operator, Internet Naming Co., acquired it and ran an early access period at the end of February 2024 before opening general registration in early March.

Some third-party reference pages still say the extension is unavailable, which is out of date. If you search the name you want and it comes back available, it is genuinely available.

No, .food has no eligibility requirements and the registry verifies nothing about you. There is no license to show, no country you must be in and no industry check.

The registry’s published policy covers acceptable use, abuse handling and reserved names, and contains no qualifying test for registrants. Privacy and proxy services are permitted, so you are not obliged to publish your home address either.

Registration is first come, first served. Because the extension opened relatively recently, more plain words are still free here than on older food-related extensions, which is a real advantage while it lasts.

Choose .food for a brand or a subject, .restaurant for a place people book a table at, and .cafe for something smaller and more casual. All three are open to anyone.

The distinction is what the word promises. .restaurant reads as a venue with a menu and opening hours, which is why it works for a dining room and awkwardly for a sauce company. .cafe carries the same venue reading in a lighter register. .food makes no claim about premises at all, so it stretches across retail, delivery, publishing and events.

There is a practical difference too: .food is the newest of the three, so availability is better, and .restaurant is the longest to type and tends to be the most expensive to keep. Write out all three with your name in front and pick the one that describes what you actually sell.

Short .food names are more available than on most food-related extensions, because general registration only opened in March 2024 and the vocabulary has been picked over far less.

The registry reserves the right to designate names as premium at its own discretion, and charges more for both registration and renewal on those, so a plain word may still come back at a higher price. That list is not published, which means searching is the only way to find out.

Try the obvious single words first, since on a newer extension they are genuinely worth a look. If the one you want is premium, check what it renews at rather than only what it costs today, and compare a two-word alternative at the standard rate.

A .food domain costs considerably more over three years than the first-year price suggests, and this is the number no seller puts on the page.

The first year is heavily discounted, occasionally to almost nothing, while the ongoing yearly figure sits many times above it. Multiply the renewal by the number of years you expect to trade, then add the discounted first year, and that is the real cost of holding the address.

So find the renewal figure on the seller’s own page before you buy. If it is not shown at all, that absence is information in itself. Then turn on auto-renew and keep your contact details current so the notices actually reach you.

A .food domain is broad by design, and for most businesses that is an advantage rather than a limit. Growth is exactly where narrower extensions start to chafe.

Consider what usually happens: a caterer starts selling jars, a restaurant launches a delivery brand, a market stall opens a wholesale line. A venue-specific address has to be explained away at that point, while .food still fits.

The trade is that broad says less. If your whole proposition is one dining room in one neighborhood, a narrower extension communicates more in the same number of characters. Pick based on where you expect the business to be in three years, not only on what it is this month.