Recipes on the blockchain

Hi to Roux, a new way to discover, save, and actually cook with digital recipes.

screenshots courtesy of Roux

I love a big idea tackling a pervasive problem. Like this one, as described by a startup exec: “We looked around and realized that digital recipes kind of suck.” 

Lisa Grimm is co-founder and CEO of Roux, a just-launched company she calls “the home of food culture.” Practically, Roux is positioned to be the home of a lot of recipes contributed by chefs and creators and people who love cooking. The way that we interact with recipes on Roux makes it special, and (this is the best part) helps compensate creators appropriately.

We — people who care about recipes on the internet — can probably agree the “old” way of displaying, sharing, and saving recipes is bad. Every 18 months or so, a minor celebrity, public figure, or random Facebook friend loudly laments reading through paragraphs-long headnotes to get to a recipe online. We’re stuck defending the practice — “They have to sell ads against the recipe to make money!” or “The recipe has to be full of search-engine-optimized keywords so Google surfaces it,” we say — because there are few other options.

“Whether it’s ads, SEO, fragmentation… we’ve taken this beautiful art form and this way of preserving history, and we’ve just turned it into… content,” Grimm told me in a recent interview.

We know what to do with internet content. We’re well-trained to interact with it by ‘liking,’ commenting, tagging, and sharing. These engagement metrics work fine for Instagram photos and some TikTok videos. But people don’t just read recipes on the internet, they cook with them in the kitchen, detached from their screens.

“On the engagement spectrum, a ‘like’ and cooking are at opposite ends,” Grimm said. “We have to build a world that is optimized for this type of engagement in the same way we have things like Spotify that are built for the engagement around music.” 

On Roux, that starts with recipes. People — as I said, creators, chefs, anyone interested in sharing an original recipe — upload them to the site. Roux calls these “living recipes,” and they’re free to access, just as it’s free to stream a song on Spotify. Users can search by requirements like allergies and dietary restrictions to find exactly what they’re looking for. Standard stuff. 

Here’s where it diverges from other services: Roux’s users pay to “collect” a recipe, saving and, later, interacting with it. It costs about $1 to collect a recipe. Once it’s collected, a user can add a modification or suggestion, creating a new version. Roux calls this a “fork,” and it ties the modified version to the original, with credit to both creators. (Grimm describes this as a far more user-friendly experience than commenting below a static recipe on a website to suggest a tweak.) When another user collects a forked recipe, both creators split the financial profit, placing tangible value on interaction, not just intellectual property. Users can also “stack” recipes under a similar financial structure, which, to stick with the easy analogy, is like creating a personalized Spotify playlist of recipes.

The idea: “The more the recipe is cooked, the more the community adds value to more versions of it, the more people it reaches and the more valuable it becomes,” Grimm said. 

Jump the Roux waitlist with code EARLY at roux.app. 

The best parts of our interview, including Lisa’s very relevant and important thoughts on recipes as women’s work and the unique pitching challenges that presents, continue below for paid subscribers. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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🎧 On the podcast:

Brandon and I talked to Lisa Grimm about Roux on The Simmer this week. Plus, Wonder’s surprising but kind of awesome Grubhub acquisition & more. 

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Expedite: Roux is built on the blockchain. I feel like this would’ve once been my headline, but now it just feels practical. [after-the-fact ed. note: It is still the headline.]