Coinstar Inc. Announces New Name for Premier Meal-Planning Site; My-Meals become Meals.com; Site Includes Personalized Recipe Recommendations.

BELLEVUE, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 9, 1999--

Coinstar Inc., (Nasdaq:CSTR) a leading coin counting and e-services company, today announced that it has completed the consolidation of it's two meal planning sites, Compucook and My-Meals.com to form one of the Internet's premier meal planning sites, Meals.com.

People who type in the Compucook and My-Meals URL will be automatically forwarded to Meals.com.

The Meals.com Web site (http://www.meals.com; AOL Keyword: meals.com) contains dozens of personalization features, including eChef. The eChef feature provides the ability to sort through the site's 12,000 recipes and develop personalized recommendations for every consumer. The feature uses state of the art predictive modeling technologies to mine the database for recipes that are of particular interest to each user. The best part is that eChef actually learns more about users preferences every time the site is used, so the more consumers use the site, the better eChef gets at making recommendations.

"When a consumer registers on the site and uses our `What's for Dinner Tonight?' feature, they are presented with ten recommendations for an entree, side dish, and dessert. Consumers love getting new dinner ideas and this allows us to personalize their experience each time they visit the site. We think users will find that the eChef recommendations get better with every visit," said Ian Melanson, vice-president and general manager of Coinstar e-services.

Extensive search features, helpful commentary and cooking tips enable anyone to come up with great ideas for their next meal. Using the MyCookbook feature, subscribers can also quickly save their favorite recipes and create complete meal plans a day or a week in advance. Recipe ingredients can be instantly scaled to the precise number of people being served at that meal. Recipes and meal plans can be fed to MyShopping List, which generates a convenient, printable personal shopping list from all the ingredients in each recipe, making the trip to the supermarket easier and better.

"We think that Meals.com offers a unique and convenient solution to a task that is increasingly difficult for today's fast-paced families," said Melanson. "This can be especially useful in households that share the meal-planning and grocery shopping duties because two or more people can edit the same shopping list. One person can begin by creating a shopping list at home. A spouse or someone else can then edit the same list from the office or anywhere that has Internet access."

"Coinstar is pleased to offer this innovative personalized meal planning and grocery shopping list capability," said Jens Molbak, CEO of Coinstar Inc. "Meals.com is one more way to fulfill our mission of delivering innovative supermarket-focused, technologies to consumers and retailers."

About Coinstar Inc.

Recently named by Deloitte and Touche as one of Washington state's fastest growing technology companies, Coinstar Inc. is a coin counting and e-services company whose mission is to deliver technology-driven services to consumers in their local supermarkets that save them time and money. Coinstar currently has more than 6,800 of its self-service coin counting machines in leading supermarkets throughout the United States, and worldwide in the United Kingdom and Canada. Consumers can call 1-800-928-CASH or visit www.findcoinstar.com to find the most convenient store location. The company's new Meals.com(TM) Web site and Coinstar Shopper(TM) service is designed to bridge the gap between the Internet and the store.

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from the results identified or implied in any forward-looking statement discussed herein. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, the risks that are more fully described under the caption "Risk Factors" included in the most recent reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission by Coinstar Inc.