Microsoft UK have just announced a new partnership with the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s in the UK bringing a refreshed look and more content to food.uk.msn.com.

What this partnerships for MSN is “a mouth-watering mix of Sainsbury’s recipes, great in-store offers, cooking tips and advice for all tastes and budgets, seasonal food ideas, help with planning events and ideas for special occasions, great drinks ideas and lots more”. There are some other useful benefits for MSN’s food portal including “tips on the best wines around” and “video recipes from the Sainsbury’s ‘Try Team’”.

It sounds like the benefit for Sainsbury is to have an online magazine-like site to compliment their physical magazine but without the costs of running it themselves. There will also be a greater prominence on the MSN UK homepage for their food supplement which will be additional advertising for Sainsbury’s.

I can see this site being useful especially with ways to gets some deals from shopping in Sainsbury’s and I am very glad that this isn’t a partnership with the likes of Asda and Morrisons. There’s no mention on how long this partnership will last but I will guess its here until at least the autumn.

One thing I have found interesting in the information about the new partnership is this “question”:

Any plans for more deals like this?

We hope so! This kind of project gives MSN UK the chance to engage our users with great food and drink content. We are confident that our users will love this new section and return again and again over the course of the campaign.

Perhaps MSN UK will have some more partnerships soon with well known companies, it could be interesting. Well I can’t sit here and blog all day, I have some recipes to try out…ok maybe not right now but perhaps some time over the summer I will, those strawberries and chocolate above look yummy.