The "hard-to-find" food items will now become much easier to find - thanks to the newly-launched Y Combinator startup Foodoro! The site is practically an online marketplace for specialty artisanal foods.

With exclusive food items from 54 vendors across the country, Foodoro will make it easy for food aficionados to search as well as ship, for themselves and their acquaintances, a wide range of items - from Mountain Jasmine Green Pearl Tea to sesame nut spice chocolate - vended from California cheese makers, Philippines' rice growers, Nebraskan buffalo farms, and a host of others!

Banking on a concept similar to TechStars' startup Foodzie last year, Foodoro intends benefiting from one of the swiftly-growing gift verticals, more so as the food-gifting market managed to amass a noteworthy $15 billion in revenue in 2008.

The prospective online hub for artisanal food-makers, Foodoro will make the vendors known to a much larger number of foodies, compared to what they would otherwise get from either their own sites or selling exclusively to specialty food stores. Foodoro's commission on each sale-purchase transaction would be 15 percent.

Not only does Foodoro provide the vendors with an e-commerce widget, which can be easily embedded on their sites, to facilitate the purchase of the products; it also allows the buyers to select from a number of shipping options using FedEx, UPS, and USPS!