In Japan, the company is testing an online grocery shopping service called CookpadMart and a video platform, CookpadTV. It is now valued at 33 billion yen (about $315 million), and says its sites draw around 800 million page views each month. Seven years later, the company went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Sano introduced a premium service for 270 yen (then about $2.50) a month that experimented with allowing users to sort recipes by popularity, hide advertisements and bookmark dishes. Today, the company says, 80 to 90 percent of Japanese women in their 20s and 30s are Cookpad users.

In that country’s highly gendered society, many women still carry the burden of preparing meals, even as they join the work force in greater numbers. Rimpei Iwata, Cookpad’s president and chief executive, attributes its early success to Japanese women.

Rather than trying to please everybody, the recipes are diverse and often hyper-regional. Against the backdrop of an American food media that is predominantly white, aspirational and celebrity-driven, Cookpad treats cooking as utility instead of entertainment, and champions home cooks over influencers. Where Cookpad hasn’t caught on big is the United States, where it was introduced in 2013. (By comparison, Allrecipes, another popular recipe platform, says it has 125 million average monthly visitors to its site from more than 200 countries.) It is one of the largest cooking platforms in the world, reporting around 100 million visitors each month, from 76 countries.

Yet Cookpad has been a global success - from Japan, where it was founded nearly a quarter-century ago, to India, Algeria and Spain. Its recipes prioritize practicality, and are mostly created by amateur home cooks. And they should be written by a charismatic cook with a huge Instagram following and an adorable dog.Ĭookpad, a recipe-sharing website and app, flouts all that. They should have the mass appeal to go viral. There are unspoken expectations the digital realm tends to place on recipes: They should photograph beautifully.

Pancakes cookpad