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Got to give a gift to a fellow "foodie"? Click on GreatFood.com.

You’re a “foodie” if whenever you go into a gift shop you make a beeline for the shelves of marinades, sauces, mustards and jams. You’re a “foodie” if your pantry contains more than one variety of hot sauce, if you don’t automatically think “Heinz” or “Hunt’s” when you hear “ketchup,” and if you have once-opened jars in your refrigerator of such exotic contents that without the label even you couldn’t identify them anymore.

If you’re a “foodie,” you need to fire up your browser (what, you don’t have a computer in your kitchen yet?) and click straight to GreatFood.com (www.greatfood.com -- recently gobbled up by the 1-800-Flowers.com online gifts empire). It’s like all the gift-shop food shelves and specialty supermarket aisles you’ve ever drooled over, rolled into one Web site. You’ll find more than 4,000 items, from Giant Belgian Crème Bears to Kachina Salsas, from Walkers Shortbread to Premium Gold Angus Beef. All the familiar names from your favorite gourmet bottles, boxes and jars are here, plus dozens more to discover: Two Buddies BBQ Sauce, Monterey Pasta Company, Mo Hotta Mo Betta, Ristorante Teatro, Frontera, Perona Farms, D’Artagnan, Grimaud Farms and on and on. You could build a whole meal here, from the appetizer paté to the smoked-salmon entrée and pasta with gourmet pesto to the cherries and nut torte for dessert, with Caffe Appassionato coffee to wash it down.

It’s important to keep that specialty-goodies shelf in mind, however, when clicking your way through GreatFood.com. This is a foodie’s paradise of bottled, canned, boxed and wrapped foods; it’s not primarily a resource for raw materials. Most of what GreatFood.com offers can be eaten without much further preparation on your part – just open the box and serve, pour the marinade and cook, or dip into the sauce. You won’t find, for example, blue-corn meal for making your own tortillas, or the chiles to put on them. The chiles here have all been processed into salsas.

In some cases, in fact, it’s hard to even order single bottles or jars of something that tempts you. You must purchase whole gift boxes or sampler baskets, which can quickly run up the cost of your order. Have a hankering for a bottle of Cayenne Garlic Hot Sauce from Mo Hotta Mo Betta, for example? You’d better be able to handle a whole case, which will set you back $55.95. Even for a foodie who likes it hot, that’s an awful lot of hot sauce.

Keep in mind that gifts make up a good part of GreatFood.com’s appeal, and the whole thing begins to come clear. After all, you’d hardly send your mom a bottle of Thai fish sauce or a can of tomatillos for her birthday. No, you want your gifts more or less ready to eat, and here GreatFood.com delivers – in tastebud-dazzling variety.

GreatFood.com really shines in its helpfulness in selecting a gift (or gift basket). Pick a price range – eight options, from $15 to over $150 – and the site will suggest about a dozen favorite gifts around that price. Only want to part with about $15? How about a nice Tortuga Rum Cake, $13.50? Feeling particularly generous? Why not spring for the Salmon Bay Gift Basket, $234.95?

You can also search by type of eating occasion – dinner party, dessert, beach party, fireside and so forth. Or pick from any of 56 food categories, from appetizers to vinegars, with chowder, cereal, chocolates and soups in-between. Still not finding the delicacy you want? There’s a keyword search, too (running on the Excite engine), though its performance can be funky: Searching for “chile” failed to find the Frontera Sampler ($22.95) that includes Red Chile Cooking Salsa, for instance.

And, yes, you will find some gourmet items here that you’re not likely to locate down at your corner A&P: Kangaroo fillets, for example (a mere $44.50 for 2.5 pounds), described as “high in protein and very low in cholesterol… similar to venison in flavor.” Or try the Seabass and Salmon Sausage from Jeremiah’s Handmade Seafood.

Once you’ve found a tempting treat, you can click to a picture and description. Here you’re really in the land of the actual food vendor, so all the foods from one source are grouped together, regardless of type. Sometimes you’ll even be transported to the vendor’s site; if there’s a glitch, you can find yourself blocked from some goodie by a pop-up box asking for a password. (So much for that Seabass and Salmon Sausage.) Mostly, though, this food-mall-like setup works well, and you can zip from John Wm. Macy's CheeseSticks to Petrossian Caviar without a second thought.

Ordering uses the now-standard shopping-cart metaphor, familiar to anyone who’s used, say, Amazon.com. Orders are shipped directly from vendors, so multiple orders arrive in multiple boxes, but you’re not charged extra as a result. Standard shipping is $6.95 per order, or you can opt for Express ($9.95) or Priority ($14.95) service if you’re really hungry or if you postponed your gift shopping until the last minute. GreatFood.com’s suppliers take care of the special packaging and refrigeration if necessary; it’s up to you to pop perishable purchases in the fridge as soon as they arrive, though.

To help guide you through its 4,000-plus choices, GreatFood.com offers what it calls “reviews,” which are really just gushing explanations of why the site chose to feature each particular vendor. These run along the lines of: “If food is an art, then Bella Cucina is Botticelli!” Not terribly helpful.

But the site does have expertise behind its selections. The in-house food expert is co-founder Donna Nourse, who boasts more 20 years in the food industry, including time in the test kitchens of Campbell’s, Nestles, Best Foods and Pillsbury and experience as a magazine food editor. Most recently, she was the corporate home economist for a grocery store chain.

Her husband and co-founder, Ben Nourse, provides the business acumen for the site. He’s a Dartmouth grad and Wharton MBA with two decades of corporate technology and business-development experience. The Nourses launched GreatFood.com in their home basement in 1996.

 "Our mission was two-fold and quite simple," says Ben Nourse. "We wanted to provide food lovers with distinctive, high-quality products, free of hassle and in a timely manner. The Web proved the perfect vehicle to bring a world of unique items to consumers hungry for gourmet foods and gifts."

Besides Donna Nourse’s expertise, the site taps featured chefs. Each is associated with some affiliated vendor’s product line, and you can even order their cookbooks (via Amazon.com) if the site’s sampling of recipes tickles your tastebuds. These are big names in the restaurant business, including such superstar chefs as Rick Bayless, Paul Prudhomme and Charlie Palmer.

You can also share ideas and recipes and ask questions about each vendor’s products in a huge, if spottily trafficked, series of message boards. Each gourmet-food supplier under the GreatFood.com umbrella gets its own forum, and some are surprisingly lively.

So do you really need GreatFood.com? Well, you don’t need any of these goodies, but they sure can add spice to your kitchen. And if you’re a true foodie, you just can’t get enough of such gourmet treats. You’ll also find GreatFood.com a godsend when it comes to gift-giving – the site will even send you a reminder e-mail when a giving occasion such as a birthday or anniversary rolls around.

In fact, gift-giving may be the best way for Web-savvy foodies to use GreatFood.com: The trick is to get your friends and relatives to discover this site. Then, when it’s time for them to give presents to you, you know you’ll get something you really love.