Innovation works like that. It depends on perfect alignment between idea and opportunity. If you're early, it’s like showing a microwave to people still cooking over fire. If you're late, someone else has already launched Ooni and changed the way we make pizza at home.

Today I’m sharing that we’re sunsetting Roux and surprisingly... I feel at peace. There’s clarity in realizing the world might not be ready for what you’ve built, even if the concept is sound and the audience enthusiastic.

Throughout my career, I’ve had a habit of seeing around corners. I used to think being early was a flaw. Maybe I wasn’t telling the story clearly enough, or moving fast enough. But over time, I’ve come to see it differently. The value isn’t just in seeing what’s next, it’s in having the patience and timing to meet the world when it’s ready. But that balance is the hardest part.

Test Runs and Turns
In 2019, after some time away from restaurants, I started reconnecting with operators. Everyone I spoke with agreed it was time for new tools and thinking. That led me to build Krumm, a business intelligence tool centered on an overlooked metric: repeat guest rate.

In tech, we know retention is more valuable than acquisition. In restaurants, we talk endlessly about hospitality, obsess over Yelp reviews, but rarely connect those efforts to what actually matters… getting guests to come back. In other words, retention.

Krumm launched two weeks before the pandemic shut everything down. As restaurants pivoted to survive, retention understandably took a back seat. Today, platforms like Blackbird and SevenRooms are picking up where we left off. Seeing those ideas thrive is a reminder that timing changes everything.

Around the same time, I launched a small project called Guest Collective with my friend Emily. What started as weekly calls to process the collapse of our industry became a space where people wrote love letters to their favorite restaurants. We collected nearly 500 stories—first dates, birthdays, quiet bowls of noodles. Each one a reminder of why restaurants matter.

And then, while watching the Super Bowl, I saw our "Write a Love Letter" CTA in a Jose Cuervo ad. WHAT?! Yeah. At first I was angry. Then proud. Now I just laugh. The idea clearly resonated, the emotion reached its audience, even if the messenger changed.

But seriously... they didn’t even try to improve the design.

Then came Roux. I was tired of how broken online recipes felt—endless scrolling, cluttered formats, great content buried in the comments. My co-founders and I built something better. We treated recipes not just as instructions, but as collaborative, creative cultural assets, and built a system that supported better distribution while allowing creators to retain ownership of their work.

At the heart of Roux was our belief that recipes are cultural primitives. Like language or art, they shape identity, and we imagined a future where your “culinary passport” could carry your food habits, preferences, and history across health, wellness, travel, and commerce.

Maybe you’ve already guessed this, but we aren’t the only ones seeing these connections. Wonder is experimenting with hybrid formats. Uber and OpenTable are beginning to integrate delivery and reservations. The industry is starting to catch up, finally seeing what we saw all along: our food experiences are deeply interconnected.

But markets move at their own pace. We couldn’t convert momentum into sustainability fast enough. Still, I’m certain the phrase “culinary passport” will show up again… and when it does, I’ll remember where it started.

The Road Ahead
To everyone who believed in Roux—our team, our investors, our creators, and early users—thank you. None of this would’ve happened without you, and I’m proud of what we built together.

Roux pushed me to think at platform scale: to imagine not just better tools, but entirely new systems. Now, with the acceleration of AI, those kinds of ideas feel more possible than ever. We’re at a moment when long-standing complexity can finally be met with real capability—and I’m here for it.

I’m stepping into what’s next with clarity, momentum, and curiosity.

I’m not done building. I’m just waiting for the flux capacitor to light up again.

Roux Voice fundamentally changes how technology fits into your kitchen. Not by making cooking easier (though it does), but by making it better.

Here's how it works: paste any recipe URL into Roux Voice. That’s it. From there, it combines ingredient measurements with instructions, so you're not constantly jumping between lists. "Add two cups of flour" instead of "add flour (see ingredients)." Small change, big difference when your hands are covered in marinade.

But Roux Voice isn't just reading recipes—it's learning about you. It remembers your kitchen tools (because nothing's worse than starting a recipe only to discover it requires a mandoline you don't own). It knows your dietary restrictions and allergies. It understands that you like your curry spicier than the recipe suggests and that you're still traumatized from that one time you tried to deep-fry turkey.

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Need a substitution for fish sauce at 11pm? Forgot the conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit? Just ask, no typing, no scrolling, no interruption to your flow.

Voice in the kitchen changes everything. Just like we stopped printing MapQuest directions once we had navigation, you'll wonder how you ever cooked while babysitting a screen. Suddenly your hands are free, your attention is undivided, and cooking feels like... cooking again.

The kitchen revolution isn't hiding in some distant future—it's here now, quietly changing everything about how you cook. Try Roux Voice once, and you'll immediately understand what's been missing all along. The old way of cooking will feel like going back to printed out directions after GPS.

Now look at your actual kitchen counter. Chances are there's a phone somewhere, probably wearing some smudges, and if you can’t find it you might have left it in the cabinet (just me?). Somewhere close by, there might be a shelf with an air fryer, instapot, or a sous vide, and likely an appliance with a smart display that's really just an expensive timer with weather updates. This is our actual kitchen of the future, and somehow it feels less advanced than the kitchen of the past.

For decades, technology has been trying to infiltrate our kitchens, and for decades, it's been failing spectacularly. The "kitchen of tomorrow" exhibits from the 1950s promised us automated cooking consoles and meal planning computers. Infomercials flooded our homes with single-purpose gadgets promising to revolutionize how we slice, dice, and "Set it and forget it!"

Silicon Valley went even further, trying to optimize away food itself. Soylent wanted to replace meals entirely, while delivery companies tried to convince us that cooking was just an inefficient way to get dinner on the table. And now our phones are drowning in recipe apps, asking us to treat our $1000 devices like cookbooks - but cookbooks never minded a little flour or needed to be constantly unlocked.

Food lovers have learned to roll their eyes at technology's promises. And they're right to do so. So far, it's all sucked.

But that doesn't mean it's going to suck forever.

The Optimization Obsession

The problem isn't the technology itself - it's the fundamental misunderstanding of what makes cooking special. Tech (big T) has a tendency to view everything as an optimization problem. Cooking, to them, is just an inefficient way of turning raw ingredients into edible output. Every attempt to "revolutionize" the kitchen has started with the premise that cooking is a problem to be solved.

This gave us smart fridges that could order milk but couldn't tell you if your dough had proofed enough. It gave us AI recipe generators that produce technically correct but soulless recipes, missing the subtle variations that make a family recipe special. It gave us meal replacement shakes that optimized away the very thing that makes food meaningful: its ability to connect us to our cultures, our memories, and each other.

Each wave of kitchen technology tried to optimize away the "inefficiencies" that actually make cooking worthwhile. The mess, the experimentation, the happy accidents, the techniques passed down through generations - these aren't bugs in the cooking process. They're features.

The Pandemic Changed our Kitchens

Then came 2020, and suddenly we were all stuck at home, forced to confront our relationships with our kitchens. Some of us discovered a love for sourdough. Others finally learned their grandmother's recipes over FaceTime. And many of us turned to social media, where something remarkable was happening.

For the first time, cooking content wasn't limited to those blessed by publishers and TV networks. Grandmothers were sharing generations-old techniques that never made it into cookbooks. Home cooks from underrepresented cultures were finally telling their own stories, their own way. The polished Food Network aesthetic gave way to authentic, handheld videos of real people cooking real food.

TikTok and Instagram revealed an enormous appetite for unfiltered kitchen knowledge. A grandmother making dumplings could reach millions without professional lighting or publisher backing. The gatekeepers of cooking knowledge had changed, and with them, our entire understanding of what people want from their kitchens.

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What's Different Now

This democratization of cooking knowledge revealed something important: people don't want to optimize away cooking. They want to get better at it. They want to understand it. They want to connect with it. And finally, technology is ready to support that journey instead of trying to shortcut it.

The past few years (ahem, months) have seen multiple technologies reach their kitchen-ready moment. Voice interfaces have evolved from clunky command-response systems to natural conversations. AI has grown from rigid, formulaic recipe generation to understanding the nuance behind cooking techniques - and more importantly, understanding you. Your taste preferences, your dietary restrictions, your allergies, your kitchen setup, even your skill level with different techniques.

Think of how mobile phones gave birth to Instagram, TikTok, and an entirely new way of sharing our lives. That wasn't just an improvement on existing communication - it was a platform shift that created new behaviors and connections. Now, the convergence of voice, AI, and our deeper understanding of what cooks actually need is setting the stage for a similar transformation in our kitchens. Not just suggesting recipes, but understanding that you prefer your curry spicier than average, that your child is allergic to nuts, that you're still building confidence with knife skills, and that your small apartment kitchen doesn't have room for a stand mixer. This isn't just about making cooking easier - it's about making it more personal, more accessible, and more successful for each individual cook.

A new generation of kitchen technology is emerging, built by people who actually cook, who understand that the future of cooking isn't about less cooking - it's about better cooking. Technology that enhances rather than replaces. Tools that remove friction without removing joy. Assistants that understand cooking isn't a problem to be solved, but a practice to be supported.

The kitchen of the future won't look like the Jetsons' promise. It'll look surprisingly like the kitchens of the past - full of warmth, mess, and humanity. But now, technology will whisper instead of shout, guide instead of dictate, enhance instead of replace. It will give us the confidence to try that new technique, the knowledge to understand why the recipe works, and the freedom to make it our own.

It turns out we never needed a kitchen that cooks for us - just one that helps us cook better.

Every year on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, my family and I make homemade cinnamon rolls together. Although my mom will often make the dough before we come home for the holiday, it takes a couple hands to roll out the dough, form the log evenly, and cut it precisely with a piece of thread. Personally, my favorite part is spreading the room temperature butter on the rolled out dough before scattering the cinnamon and brown sugar filling all over. I’ve always loved to squish things with my hands (I’m sure that says something about me). Once we cut the slices and place them in the pan, I like to stake a claim to my cinnamon roll even before it proofs. These days, I will happily concede it to my niece or nephew but absolutely not to another adult. 

On Thanksgiving day, my mom wakes up at the crack of dawn to put the cinnamon rolls into the oven so we can all wake up to the smell of them cooking. It’s as incredible as it sounds. When we’re up, we put a fire in the fireplace, turn on the Thanksgiving Day Parade even though we haven't recognized the people in it for years, and devour the cinnamon rolls with homemade hot chocolate. As a kid, I always had two. As an adult, the sugar rush of half a roll makes me crash at 12pm but hey, that’s what naps are for. 

Every year my mom and I argue over the recipe. She has at least three printed recipes, covered in notes, all tracking her changes year over year. To me, it’s the Rosetta Stone and I highly doubt I could “follow” her recipe. Just yesterday I was asking her about her recipe for this year and we argued about whether or not she put the butter and brown sugar combination on the bottom of the pan for extra stickiness. I said it’s her signature, she said she hasn’t done it in years. This drives me crazy. It shouldn’t be this hard. 

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You know what’s coming next. Yes, we built something at Roux to preserve my mom’s cinnamon roll recipe, and your uncle’s pecan pie that always falls apart but is delicious, and also the stuffing that has to be on the table to avoid a mutiny. Capturing these recipes is really important because every November we’re bombarded with au courant Thanksgiving recipes, promising that this year's new root vegetable will finally liberate us from marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes. But for most of us, Thanksgiving isn't about culinary innovation – it's about those misshapen, unfashionable dishes that only your family could love and without which the holiday wouldn't feel the same. This is the food that defines our tables, not because it's Instagram-worthy, but because it's ours.

We invite you to immortalize your "it wouldn't be Thanksgiving without it" dish in the first-ever Roux Thanksgiving Community Cookbook. Share those gravy-stained recipe cards, the techniques passed down through muscle memory rather than exact measurements, and the stories that make each creation a cherished part of your family's tradition.

From our perspective, there's profound meaning in the dishes that connect us to who we are and where we come from. Your grandmother's slightly lumpy gravy carries more wisdom than any test kitchen creation. That cracked pumpkin pie tells a story no filtered photo can capture. Roux is where these culinary heirlooms live on, where the heart behind a recipe matters more than technical precision.

Ready to contribute? Head to Roux and tap Community Cookbook on the homepage. Choose wisely – each person can only share one recipe. The cookbook will be open for submissions starting today until Monday, December 9th.

This community cookbook will serve as a testament to the imperfect perfection of real-life holiday cooking and a home to document and celebrate our culinary stories. This Thanksgiving, let's reclaim our taste and honor the dishes that define us, not the ones that define the moment.

It’s hard to make a statement that goes against the grain. It’s hard to point out the flaws in a system everyone seemingly loves, but after spending my days and nights and whatever is in between in the digital culinary world, I am legitimately scared we are losing our culinary identities. When our entire system is built to serve algorithms and scale, we lose the “create” in creator. Now more than ever, taste deserves its own space, and it is with that urgency that we introduce Roux to the world. 

Our culinary identities—the foods we love, the flavors that transport us, the recipes passed down through generations—shape who we are as deeply as our language or culture. But our relationship with food is being reshaped by the machinery of digital platforms, transforming diverse culinary traditions into uniform content, and authentic culture into algorithmic slop.

It’s time to take back our taste.

Roux is the home of food culture. We are building for the nuance and complexity of our culinary identities. We embrace the mess. We are splatters and handwritten edits; the binder bursting at the seams of printed, clipped, and scribbled recipes. Our foundation rests on three pillars: creative expression, communal wisdom, and value alignment—each essential to preserving authentic food culture in the digital age.

Creative Expression 

When algorithms and audience metrics determine which recipes succeed and which voices are heard, we lose the very essence of what makes food culture vibrant: its wild, unrestrained creativity and diversity. True culinary expression demands a return to permissionless creation, where ingredients, flavors, and techniques can flow freely across borders and generations, without platform intermediaries deciding their worth. 

Communal Wisdom 

The culinary community is built on collaboration and an open exchange of ideas. When one cook discovers a clever substitution, another saves a trip to the store. When someone perfects the timing, another avoids a burnt dinner. When a home cook shares their grandmother's secret ingredient, an entire community's dishes come alive. This communal approach stands in stark contrast to today's food content landscape, where platforms capture all the value while reducing rich culinary dialogue to simple engagement metrics.

Value Alignment

The internet didn't make recipes free—it broke the value chain between those who create and those who cook. What's needed isn't more paywalled content, but a fundamental realignment of how value flows through the culinary ecosystem. Community owned networks restore the direct connection between creators and cooks, enriching our culinary experiences and building our collective culinary knowledge.

Roux began with our frustrations using digital recipes. As veterans of the food industry, we understand the cultural and financial ecosystem that recipes power, and we respect the idea of ownership—unlike many recipe management apps optimized for consumers. The deeper we dug, the more we saw how gatekeepers and commercialization were corrupting food culture. What started as a personal frustration became an urgent mission.

Our taste is our identity—captured in grandmother's recipe boxes with handwritten notes in the margins, preserved on cookbook shelves that map our culinary journeys, reflected in the dishes that define our homes. As phones replace recipe boxes and screens become our kitchen companions, we refuse to let our relationship with food be flattened into platform content. Roux transforms these intimate collections into something built precisely for our digital lives—where technology amplifies rather than dilutes our culinary identity.

What's at stake isn't just recipe authenticity, but the very way we understand ourselves through food in this digital age. At Roux, we're encoding cuisine to preserve our culinary traditions—past, present, and future. 

So let’s rebuild food culture. Add your recipe to Roux to take back your taste (code: LEEKS). Fork others. Push the limits of our new digitally-native kitchen primitives by creating a stack inspired by your favorite cartoon. And hold onto those Thanksgiving recipes; we have a plan for those next week.

Aly and I were the two lead hosts at The Dutch, the restaurant that kicked off our collective next-level obsession with restaurants (trust me). We rarely worked the same shift, so our friendship developed over the phone, ranting and raving about our nights after we got off from work. Eventually our jobs and schedules changed, so we actually got to hang out, and as soon as we did, our friendship exponentially grew. To this day, people never understand that Aly and I were friends because from the outside, we presented very differently. On the inside, we had the exact same core. We had both experienced shit in our childhoods and therefore had zero tolerance for BS in our adult lives. Like all great friendships, Aly and I talked to one another about all the stuff we couldn’t talk to other people about. I hope you all know that feeling. The, you never have to pretend, never have to sugar coat, just get to be your honest self, type of friendship. 

Aly and Patrick got married in 2014 (hi Patrick, love you), had twin boys in 2016, and moved down to Baltimore a year later. I visited them every couple of months and FaceTimed with Aly constantly. Somehow we grew even closer with the distance. In December 2018, Aly was diagnosed with stage four cancer. She settled on a treatment plan that involved Western medicine, Eastern medicine, diet and nutrition, prayer blankets, and crystals. Looking back, I would have done the exact same thing. 

Food was always an important part of Aly’s life. She and her husband were accomplished restaurant professionals for decades, and simply, they loved great food. Aly regularly made her kids’ baby food from scratch, and as they grew up, she cooked meals for them I was envious of. Her treatment plan required her to change her diet drastically. The easiest (although incomplete) way to describe her new diet was close to keto; no sugar, no carbs, high good fats. 

In the first year of her diagnosis, Aly never once complained about her diet or talked about missing the foods she couldn’t eat. I would visit Aly even more regularly during chemo to help out when her energy was especially low. Low energy for Aly was high energy for anyone else, but all of us around her encouraged her to take a beat every now and then. One day, in the midst of running around, doing everything a healthy person would be doing but actually fighting stage four cancer and enduring chemo, Aly looked at me and said “Lisa. I want a donut. So badly. Can you make me a donut?”. If Aly had asked me to carve a life-sized elephant out of butter I would have said yes, so this seemed small in comparison. But then it set in… how the fuck was I going to make a donut without sugar or flour. 

Oh, glorious internet. Here I go, searching the webs to understand (1) every specific detail of her diet and (2) the options for making a donut given those restrictions. This was the first time in my life cooking felt unfamiliar to me. I started my research (research? to cook? still sounds ridiculous) and eventually found my way to food as medicine food blogs, cancer-fighting diets, and keto evangelists. Within 48 hours I learned everything one could know about monk fruit sugar, erythritol, and stevia, and the glycemic index of tigernut flour vs. almond flour vs. cassava flour (to this day, I cannot believe Aly enjoyed the taste of stevia – both her husband and I despise it). 

I sourced metal pans that were as free of plastics and chemicals as humanly possible and then got to cooking. And holy crap, it worked. She loved them. The funny thing is, I could never taste those donuts because they were made with almond flour which I am allergic to. It felt very strange to (1) cook with ingredients I knew nothing about and (2) serve someone food I never tasted. For the first time in a long time, food brought her joy, and I was responsible for that. I’m not crying, you’re crying. 

Aly’s health deteriorated rapidly in Jan 2021. I was with her in those last weeks, and when I knew the sugar-free and gluten-free donuts weren’t going to help, I started cooking for the rest of her family. Honestly, I didn’t know what else to do. At that moment, I knew food wasn’t going to bring anyone joy, but it was going to sustain us, and that’s the only thing we could hope for. 

So… I made them pot roast. 

I had never made pot roast before, and although I probably ate it at some point, I don’t associate it with some loving, warm, family memory. At the time, it just felt like the right thing to do. 

Now, Patrick, his boys and I have a new tradition. Whenever I visit, I make them that pot roast. The first time we ate it, it was utterly devoid of joy. Even if our taste buds registered “wow, this is delicious,” there was no way to experience that pleasure under those circumstances. Now, we can indulge. We can taste. We can enjoy one another’s company. We can celebrate an outrageously beautiful person, and the time and love we were lucky enough to share with her. 

Those donuts and this pot roast are so much more than recipes. I don’t feel like I have to make some declarative statement here like “food connects us blah blah blah.” There’s no way you’ve read this without feeling something, and everyone has a story like this. These food stories are rarely about the “perfect bite” or “the reservation I woke up at 6am for.” 

Food is feeling-ful. Since we all feel something about food, we can connect with one another through the recognition of those emotions. Maybe it’s because while we’re eating, we’re doing little else, or because smell is the strongest sense tied to memory. I am sure someone has figured out the science behind it, but for me… I’d rather tell you my stories of donuts and pot roast, and leave it at that. 

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The beautiful surprise was that our culinary community's two sides are more in sync than anyone realized. Consumers and creators aren't just speaking the same language – they're practically finishing each other's sentences on some of the industry's biggest challenges. This isn't just interesting data; this is the kind of insight that could reshape how we think about the entire culinary ecosystem.

Monetization

Let's start with a juicy one, monetization. Right now, creators are stuck in a bizarre situation where they're building massive audiences but scratching their heads about sustainable income. Consumers have said loud and clear that they want to support creators more directly. But forcing people to choose between a monthly subscription or nothing at all is like offering someone either a five-course meal or an empty plate. The data shows there's this whole middle ground of support models we're completely missing.

Creation and Discovery

Then there's the hamster wheel of content. Creators are burning themselves out trying to appease the algorithm's whims. Meanwhile, consumers just want to find what they're looking for when they're ready to cook. "Newest" – a concept core to content creation – is actually meaningless for recipe discovery. It won't help you plan a dinner party, find a vegan coffee cake, or meal plan for your family. So we have this painful irony: creators push themselves to constantly produce more content, while consumers simply want better search. It's wild that in 2024, you can search for literally anything online except a high-quality recipe that matches your needs and tastes. The recipes are there – creators are producing a constant stream of them. But if they're not discoverable in a meaningful way, they might as well not exist.

Community

Here's where it gets really interesting: the community dynamics. As I've said in the past, culinary creators aren't just in it for the views or likes – they're genuinely driven by the relationships they build with their audiences. And consumers aren’t looking for a one-way cooking broadcast either. They're seeking real interaction, treating recipes less like manuals and more like conversations. When a creator shares a recipe, it's not the period at the end of a sentence – it's the beginning of a dialogue about technique, variations, and personal touches.

The problem is that right now, these conversations are trapped in a digital wasteland. Imagine making a brilliant modification to a recipe or having a story about how it became your family's new tradition – where does that insight go? Into the void of comment sections, buried under a pile of fire emojis and "Yum!" reactions. Or maybe into DMs, where your experience becomes a private message instead of enriching the recipe for everyone else. We're forcing vibrant culinary conversations into formats that were built for hot takes and quick reactions, not meaningful dialogue about food. Countless insights, innovations, and connections are lost to the ephemeral nature of social media interactions.

I ended my last post by posing this question, "Imagine a world you could start from scratch. How would you build [a new culinary ecosystem]?" Like I said, it's my favorite question in user research because it gives people permission to dream beyond the constraints of what exists today. But admittedly, it's hard to think outside the box, and it's even harder to act outside of it (s/o Sally). Most people can’t live in the dream state of "what if" on a regular basis; our lives are busy, we're always on the move, and honestly, we've got bigger fish to fry (pun intended). But as a technologist, it's my responsibility to exist in that dream state – to study an industry, to dream the "what ifs," and to backwards engineer the how.

There's a quote written on the whiteboard behind my desk that I read at least once a week: "If I had to solve this problem today, with the technology available, would the solution look the same?" This question cuts through the noise. It challenges us to see beyond the status quo of social media feeds, ephemeral interactions, and algorithmic pressures to what's actually possible.

The answer is no – the solution wouldn't look anything like what we have today. This reframing totally shifts how we think about building a new culinary platform. Instead of forcing creators and consumers into rigid, algorithm-driven boxes, we need to create spaces that support the natural behaviors and connections that make cooking meaningful. Technology should amplify the human elements that make cooking social, not try to automate them away.

We have all the ingredients for something revolutionary: creators who want to build genuine connections, consumers eager to engage meaningfully, and technology capable of facilitating these interactions in ways that current platforms simply can't. The question isn't whether we can build a better culinary ecosystem – it's whether we're willing to imagine it first.

So… we've had a bit of press lately.

Changing Tastes by Alys Keys at Digital Frontier covers the digital food landscape. An avid cook herself, Alys dives into how we got here, and where we’re going (spoiler, Roux). I met Alys when my co-founders and I were in London this spring; she was inspired by our experiences between food and tech, and I love her perspective on our little corner of culture. 

Alexis at Glitter Ledger, a podcast about crypto but not about crypto, sat down with me to talk about dobos torte and the difference between WeWork bros and crypto bros. Alexis is absolutely hilarious and you don’t need to know a thing about blockchain to have a laugh. 

When we set out to interview 30+ culinary creators, I couldn’t have anticipated how much ground we would cover. We wanted to understand what makes them tick, what feeds their creativity, and how they navigate career building, but that was just the start. Before we dig into the details, I just want to say I was floored by these culinary creators. They are overworked and underpaid, and they still love every (ok, most) aspect of their jobs. They do the heavy lifting to preserve culture, foster genuine connection across digital and physical planes, and overcome every roadblock to creative expression. Just… wow. 

Ok. Roll the tape.

Community first

Culinary creators are motivated by connection; engaging with their audience drives both their business and their creative spark. Every comment, every like, gets them closer to being in the kitchen with their communities, helping them cook step by step. It’s hard for outsiders to understand the sincere motivation of being a culinary creator. Every time it comes up, I get the humble answer “I just want to help people cook”. This seemingly simple statement belies a profound truth—there's an indescribable magic in the act of nurturing others through food. Words alone struggle to capture the power behind this unique blend of artistry and altruism.

DMs, comments, and email are meant to build closeness but managing all the volume across channels can become overwhelming and stressful. For a moment, imagine if an audience of 400,000 (on only one of four platforms) started asking you for cooking advice and product recommendations. Although this connectivity is the goal, it’s not particularly sustainable. Because community engagement is siloed and creators are spread thin across multiple platforms, some hire community managers to scale their outreach and answer each and every question that comes through. Despite these challenges, creators consistently say that there’s nothing better than learning that someone has cooked their recipe. It’s one of the highs of what they do, and it’s an important reminder that despite all the chaos, they’re cutting through and inspiring people to cook.

Recipes are not just “content” 

Recipes take a significant amount of experience, time and money to create but the quality of a recipe has little bearing on its commercial success. Even though consumers have made it abundantly clear that recipe quality is the most important factor in choosing a recipe, the algorithm determines whether it lives or dies. Creators are forced to shoehorn their work into video content, daily posting, trendings, etc to perform according to the algorithm. 

This price of entry to simply reach their own audience is becoming too high. Creators are burnt-out from the demands of daily posting, expense of recipe testing and high quality video production, and the pressure to conform in a world built to trend. Very few people understand the work that goes into developing a high quality recipe. When America’s Test Kitchen added a paywall, they advertised that each recipe on their site costs $11k to produce. Truly, I have so many questions, but it’s a glimpse into the time, effort, and skills needed to do it well. You better believe we’re going to tell the story of recipe development on our socials.  

The monetization dilemma 

How a creator chooses to monetize is based on two factors; how they think their audience perceives their value, and how their peers are monetizing. Think about it… it’s the location of paywall on substack (on recipe posts only, in the archive, etc), the decision of whether or not to have ads on a blog, the strategic location of a recipe on a post (caption, DM, link in bio, etc). 

There’s a camp who firmly believes if you give away years of free content, your community will one day buy your cookbook and there’s a camp who trains their audience to pay for everything from day one. It’s pretty heartbreaking listening to creators agonize over their own self-worth and constantly measuring themselves against their peers. The industry has become totally fixated on vanity metrics like follower counts and best-seller lists and still, it’s rare to find a creator who feels fairly compensated for their work.

My other worry is that the whiplash for consumers is not good for the industry and keeps advertisers enshrined in their position to subsidize the entire industry. Whether in the form of traditional ads or more subtle brand partnership, they are inescapable. Some creators accept that as truth, while others are well aware of the risk of not owning their value but unfortunately they have no alternatives. The latter are the creators welcoming a more robust conversation about sustainability, value and community. That’s our crew. 

Cookbooks are still king, but the industry is changing

You cannot talk about recipes without talking about cookbooks; today, they are synonymous. Every culinary creator wants a cookbook because in an industry with endlessly diverse business models, cookbooks are universally respected, celebrated, and measured. It hits every note in a culinary career although the financial benefits are widely debated (are you seeing a trend?). It brings recognition, relevancy, and opens new doors that are often associated with more financial stability (finally) but social media has drastically changed how publishers approach the vertical. 

Huge followings and viral content trump experience and high quality engagement frustrating many established recipe developers. Do likes and virality translate to book sales? No, at least not consistently, yet without better signals these are the numbers the industry relies on. Also, I understand why creators have to grovel for book pre-sales, but there’s got to be a better way. I can't imagine they like starting every post and newsletter with 'Please buy my book now' for two months straight. It's like being stuck in an infomercial, but instead of a Slap Chop, it's your magnum opus.

I want to pause there and let that marinate for a minute. I love (wow, I’m a nerd) processing massive data sets like this straight into solutions because I’ve always enjoyed finding order from chaos. But I want to give you a moment to internalize this, and in that processing there’s an important distinction I want to make. These conversations speak to the system we’ve all been forced to operate in, not necessarily the way we want to operate. 

My favorite question to ask in any user research setting is something along the lines of “Imagine a world you could start from scratch. How would you build this (workflow, experience, product, etc)?”. So, with all that you know about your own experience with culinary creators, and now what you know about peeling back the curtain of their experience, think about what the next evolution of this ecosystem might look like. That’s where we’ll dig in next week. Until then, my friends.

Allrecipes, America’s Most Unruly Cooking Web Site

Please read this whole article. Ruby Tandoh deftly weaves together threads of history, community, and cuisine through the unexpected lens of a recipe website. It tracks the rise (and fall?) of Allrecipes.com from a small project started by students at the University of Washington through its sale to Dotdash Meredith, a media conglomerate that owns Food & Wine, The Spruce Eats, Serious Eats, etc. 

There are two parts of this article I found fascinating; the early insights from the team, and the broader cultural reflections. The team’s three big learnings post-launch were: 

(1) Family recipes are treasured. 

(2) People love sharing their recipes.

(3) Digital recipes need to be searchable and adaptable, not simply static blocks of text. 

Hmm. This sounds very familiar. 

(1) Family recipes are treasured. Receipt: Every single time I speak to a potential Roux user, they get excited about preserving family recipes. They are sacred. Nothing comes up more frequently. 

(2) People love sharing their recipes. Receipt: In 2001, Allrecipes was the most popular site on the internet. Today, it has 40 million monthly visitors and lest we forget, 50% of Instagram’s content is food-related. Hey Metcalfe, what’s the value of that network? 

(3) Digital recipes need to be searchable and adaptable, not just static blocks of text. Receipt: The case for consumers confirms that culinary flexibility—in both recipe discovery and adaptation—is not merely a consumer preference, but a basic requirement. Any product that wants to be in today's kitchen must embrace these fundamentals.

The author also offers insightful commentary on the broader landscape of food culture. 

(1)"Tech has been trying, and mostly failing, to improve on traditional cookbooks for a long time." Allrecipes was ahead of the game with its data model, which allowed for scalable, adaptable recipes and smart search functions. But after being acquired, much of that innovation was discarded (smh). Why is it that the industry keeps ignoring how people actually want to cook?

(2) "Even a great cook may be inept at recipe writing, a complex exercise that involves carefully recording your work and anticipating any of the million places where an amateur might slip up." Recipe quality is important! Recipe writing is hard! Roux’s community ranked recipe quality the most important factor in choosing a recipe source.

(3) “Community cookbooks circulated by rotary associations, Girl Scout troops, synagogues, churches, sororities, and military wives’ circles are perhaps the most prolific expression of American culinary thought.” The digital revolution of the past two decades has fundamentally altered our social fabric and modes of connection. Without adapting how we share culinary heritage to these new paradigms, we risk not only failing to preserve our food cultures, but also missing crucial opportunities for their evolution and enrichment.

Allrecipes tapped into something profound: recipes aren't just instructions for cooking, they're living, breathing cultural artifacts that tell the story of who we are and where we come from. Cindy Carnes’s Banana Cake VI doesn’t simply feed our bodies—it nourishes our souls with memories and tradition (there’s a reason the language around the subscribe button here is “If you subscribe, I might give you my mom’s chocolate cookie recipe”). 

But as our world becomes increasingly digital, we need to find new ways to not only keep these culinary connections alive, but evolve them. Technology is at its best when building expansive, vibrant communities that transcend geographical boundaries and generational gaps. The right technology gives us the tools to connect culinary heritage and traditional techniques with cutting-edge creativity; where every cook is both a student and a teacher. 

Now, let's talk about the elephant in the room, ahem, kitchen—the cycles of tech products that started off promising and ended… well, let’s just say they ended. It's insanely frustrating, especially for those of us who've been in both the food and tech worlds for years. It's time to break this cycle and create something that stays true to its roots, something that doesn't sacrifice soul for scale. Recipes are not just ad real estate, they are the foundation of food culture.

Here's where I get excited (if you couldn’t already tell). Instead of chasing likes and follows, Roux focuses on the genuine exchange of knowledge and inspiration. We are building a platform that doesn’t just last but continually evolves like the culinary world itself, where we can honor our food heritage while also pushing it forward, creating new traditions for future generations. We’re not just another recipe app; we’re powering a new era of culinary creativity and collaboration. So like they say… let them cook.

Food for Thought

Team family recipe or Team professional recipe? Let me know in the comments.

Listening unlocked observing. I would watch and chronicle someone’s actions and body language – did Aunt Evelyn laugh at Uncle Joe’s joke (no), was Mom’s subtle smirk recognition that everyone is quietly devouring the desserts (yes). These skills take center stage in adulthood, but, as a kid, it felt like a secret language. Weaving together my findings from listening and observing was my method for developing rich assessments of situations and environments. 

Of course, everyone listens and everyone observes, but I always felt like I did it a little differently. I’ve watched others announce bold opinions and edit them after (or sometimes not at all), but I preferred having the pieces to craft the argument first. I also recognized that my thought process was rarely linear. It was not block by block. It was block, connection, pause, block, and then poof: grand idea. In Strategic Intuition, William Duggan makes sense of this chaotic yet calm way of thinking that often sparks transformative insights (it’s an excellent read). 

This is one of the reasons I find myself drawn to early-stage companies. There are so many inputs, there’s so much to process, and it’s never linear. When a team is anchored in a bold vision, the path for how to get there unfolds through a delicate balance of data (listening and observing), hypotheses, and instincts. 

Like many businesses, Roux began with an acute frustration that seemed fixable. I love cooking, but the experience of using digital recipes drives me absolutely mad.

• Why can’t I search for the name of a recipe I’ve saved on Instagram or TikTok??

• How are we still in the endless-pop-up-ads-or-life story-burying-the-recipe era?!!? 

• How the hell am I supposed to find all my tomato recipes across my cookbooks, saved recipes on Instagram, Substacks, and bookmarked food blogs in the middle of August when tomatoes are perfection?!

• Is cooking from my phone supposed to give me motion sickness? Scrolling up to the ingredient measurements and down to the steps makes me nauseous. Up and down, up and down, up and down. 

If I've triggered you, I’m sorry, but I promise you’re in the right place. 

As I increasingly cooked from digital recipes, it became clear that food blogs, Instagram, Substack, TikTok (omg, the pausing and rewinding, second by second, to see all the measurements in the video… I left that one out), etc. weren’t actually made for the activity of cooking, they were made for distribution. Even though 50% of content on Instagram is food related, it’s built for likes and follows, not sears and dices — which, let’s be real, are on the opposite end of the engagement spectrum from one another. My favorite creator quote of all time is: “I don’t make recipes so people can like them while they’re taking a shit”. Preach. It felt pretty obvious to me that on the digital platforms that dominate our lives today, every step of the cooking experience — from discovery to editing to organizing — was painful if not impossible. I knew I couldn’t be the only person who felt this way. 

A couple weeks ago, we shared two surveys with our community, and 500 responses later, I am now 100% sure I am not alone. Our goals for these surveys were (1) get to know our target user, (2) validate some existing hypotheses, and (3) identify any significant pain/gain points we were unaware of. I consider this the listening phase. The raw data is fascinating, but weaving it together into insights illuminates the frustrations of this community tenfold. 

You know those people in your life who are responsible for coordinating big meals? The ones who always have stocked pantries, and every one of their feeds is clogged with recipes? Those are our people, and because I include myself in this prestigious (geeky?) group, I’m embracing the royal “we.” 

1: We want to search for recipes, not be served them. 

We don’t scroll, find a delicious recipe, and declare: “Oh, that looks delicious! I’m going to run out right now, buy those ingredients, cancel my evening plans, and make khao soi instead!”. 

Cooking requires planning, so we save recipes and create notes and Google Docs so we can find them when we’re ready to get in the kitchen. Some of us even experiment with dedicated recipe management apps, but they don’t stick because they’re clunky and honestly, just not fun to use (I’ll come back to those apps). It’s utter chaos out here. 

2: A recipe is the starting line, not the finish line. 

A recipe is written one way and then never cooked the same way twice. I will say this line over, and over, and over again because nothing has ever been more true. Taste and preferences, dietary and budget restrictions, skill level, sustainability… there are endless reasons why someone would change a recipe. The real question is: why did we ever think a recipe was a monologue, not a dialogue? 

3: We’ll pay for the culinary content we want, but we don’t always want life stories and subscriptions. 

Cooking mode is not reading mode; we want recipes separate from stories. Subscriptions hold us back from being able to support the number of creators we want to support. In other words, we want to give creators more money… but not all of our money. 

These are very real frustrations that hold back the entire culinary community. When consumers have a hard time engaging with recipes, the perceived value of recipes decreases (friction = crappy experience). Creators put a significant amount of time, effort and money into recipe creation - if we're just watching them, and not cooking them, what's the point?

I, personally, feel responsible for changing that. Cooking is empowering and connective. It has an enormous impact on our wellness and on our planet’s health. I’m not going to sit around and let technology make it more difficult to cook. That’s just ridiculous. 

We’re listening and building Roux from inside the kitchen so that we can power a new era of culinary creativity and collaboration. The best part is that so many of the frustrations on the demand side (consumers) match the frustrations on the supply side (creators). Cue the dramatic cliffhanger music, and we’ll dig into the case for creators next week. 

Food for thought

When Recipeasly launched in 2021, it was quickly met with intense backlash from the industry and was shut down within hours. Recipeasly stripped recipes of their context and provenance, all in the name of a better consumer experience. This prevented creators from generating income in the form of ads, page views, and engagement metrics, and reopened the conversation around recipe monetization. My question is simply: why is the industry not protesting all (I just counted 50+) the other recipe manager apps in the app store?

I’ll start from the beginning:

When I graduated college, I joined a management consulting firm. After a couple years, I realized I needed to be a bit more passionate about my work.

Katzenbach Partners taught me everything I’ll ever need to know about workplace culture. It was an intellectual playground where principals, designers, and receptionists were all treated equally and celebrated. A very specific recruiting process fed into this culture; everyone who walked in the door started with an A+. I got to experience this firsthand working with Kristen on the recruiting team. She screwed me over by setting the bar way too high for future managers. Over fifteen years later, I would never hesitate to ask a Katzenbacher for help, and I’m always happy to return the favor. 

I knew I wanted to work in food, but I didn’t know what part, so I joined the events team at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. I also trained in the dining room, worked on the farm, and helped with the programming team. I realized pretty quickly that I loved the energy of being on the floor of a restaurant, so I left the farm to join Andrew Carmellini’s newest opening, The Dutch. 

Across all of my friends and family, I knew one… only one… person who worked in food, Jake of Dickson's Farmstand Meats. He was gracious enough to meet (meat, HA) with me. He doesn’t know this, but his story lit a fire within me. He was the first person I had ever met who followed their passion into the professional world. Everyone else I knew had a job because they were supposed to make money or have a certain title. He just did the thing he wanted to do. I still remember the feeling I had after talking to him and realizing that I, too, could follow my passion. 

He was very connected in the farm-to-table movement, which, at the time, was only starting to take hold. I knew that movement was where I needed to start my journey, so I applied for an apprenticeship program at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. I was accepted to the program (before you ooo and ahhh, it was unpaid, so I don’t think it was particularly competitive), but after I got in, they told me that there was an opening on the events team if I wanted a paying job. I asked if I could do both, and they said yes (free labor? sure). It was the first time I had to clock into a job. My clock-in number was 305, and every single time I clocked in/out, I thought “take it to the house” in my head. No, I’m not kidding.

When most of my friends were getting their MBAs, I was a host making $13/hour, and it was the best decision of my life. I quickly rose through the ranks from Maitre d’ to Manager to Director of Guest Relations, and I opened eight restaurants in five years with what became NoHo Hospitality Group. 

Oof, where to start. I’m tired just thinking about those years. There’s no better way to spend your 20s in New York City than opening restaurants. First, the opening team at The Dutch was brilliant. I could easily dedicate an entire newsletter to Colin, Deb, Ricci, Chad, BQ, Jamie, and the crew. I also met my best friend Aly there. I could regale you with stories about food critics, a debaucherous La Paulée afterparty, or Beyoncé (she touched my arm!)... actually, I’m getting the sense I do really need a whole post about this. 

Those of us who work in tech think about scale a lot, but physical and emotional scale is an entirely different beast. Eight restaurants later, I kept running into Brandon (who I vaguely knew through the industry). He was taking meetings in the new hotel we had opened. One day, I saw him in the lobby cafe, the next in the bar, the following for breakfast in the restaurant. He convinced me that if I joined Resy I’d be the first person to improve my work-life balance by joining a startup. He was right, but not by much. 

There was a new wave of hospitality tech companies popping up, and I joined Resy as the Director of Hospitality. What does a Director of Hospitality do as employee seven at a tech startup? I still don’t know. When Resy pivoted from being a concierge platform to a full reservations platform, Ben looked at me and said: “You’re the product manager, you should tell the engineers what to build.” I Googled “what’s a product manager,” and luckily my team of engineers guided me from there. With our small-but-mighty squad, ResyOS went from seating one million guests a year to one million guests a month. 

This job set me on a new course. Ben believed in me and pushed me; Paul, Eric, Joe (Roux co-founder!), and Mike patiently taught me how to build a product (and insisted I never learn CS); Stephanie, Ryan and I formed a connection between sales, CS, and product that I talk about every.single.time I give a talk about early-stage teams (“the Google sheet” is infamous).

After a couple years, I joined WeWork with the hopes of learning from career product professionals. Despite all the headlines, there were some incredibly talented people there, and I was able to learn from quite a few. 

I realized I wasn’t quite done with hospitality tech, so I left to create my first startup, a business intelligence tool for restaurants. I was ready to launch my first beta when the pandemic hit. Restaurants were decimated in those early days, so the product got shelved. 

Oy, what a time. The only good part of this chapter is that it freed me up to think about silly, frivolous (read, fun) things, so what started as weekly check-ins with Emily to mourn the collapse of the industry turned into a sweet, lighthearted experience that put smiles on people’s faces. We built a simple website where people could write a love letter to their favorite restaurant and share a beautiful memory from the before times. We hit about 500 Love Letters, and the concept was powerful enough that Cointreau ripped it off and made it into a Superbowl ad. Yep. 

In the fall of 2020, I joined DEMI, a culinary community platform where creators monetized their followings via group chats. Unfortunately, we never found product-market fit, but the experience gave me exposure to a different side of the culinary industry and reminded me how much I loved building early-stage products.

DEMI reminded me that people are OBSESSED with food. The quality of engagement in these chats was off the charts and blew standard consumer retention targets out of the water. The pandemic was a unique moment in time when people went back to basics, and cooking was a major part of that. But the chats were more than momentary hobbyists; they were filled with chronic dinner party hosts, recent cooking school graduates, and backyard BBQ pros. The time I spent chatting with DEMI users breathed new life into me and showed me that the culinary community was bursting at the seams for a better consumer experience. 

I’ve known Krystle for many years; we collaborated in the early days of BentoBox on new restaurant launches (Resy’s reservation widget was embedded on a restaurant’s BentoBox-powered website). We always wanted to work together, and even though I knew Roux was around the corner, we decided that post-Fiserv acquisition would be a great time for me to join BentoBox in an interim role. I originally signed on as VP of Product for six months, although I ended up staying a year and six months thanks to an incredible team. 

BentoBox was the first later-stage company I ever worked for that I thought I could be happy at longterm. 80% of BentoBox employees have worked in the restaurant industry, which means there is customer empathy up and down the organization - and it shows. It was such an honor to lead a team of all-star product managers, product designers, and product operations managers (there are too many of you to name, but you know who you are). Acquisitions are (very) hard, but crafting a vision for a unified restaurant tech stack was a major milestone in my hospitality-centric career. I’m honored that vision is still being implemented today. On my last day, Krystle looked at me and said “wow, that was fun” - and honestly, it was.

And that’s where Part 1 ends. Each of these roles, these people, these companies has gifted me a tool to build Part 2. The culture of Katzenbach, the ethos of Blue Hill, the energy of The Dutch, the team at Resy, the expertise at WeWork, the community from DEMI, and the leadership at BentoBox. That’s a recipe for success (sorry/not sorry).

Food for thought

I just surveyed over 350 people and learned A LOT. For starters…

87% of respondent said they discover recipes on Instagram 

43% of respondent said they save recipes on Instagram

72% of respondents said they search for a recipe when there’s a specific ingredient they want to use 

75% of respondents said they search for a recipe when there’s a style of meal they want to cook (dinner party, holiday meal, weekly meal prep, etc.)

So… let the people search, right?

When it comes to cooking, people want (need?) to be in control. They need robust search functionality to accommodate their unique preferences and needs. There’s an enormous gap in today’s market between what we’re served, and what we want.

I don’t need to explain that this is a half thought. If you want it to be closer to a three-quarter thought, let me know in the comments.

This week, Carla Lalli Music wrote an ode to her longtime food stylist Susie Theodorou. First, heck yeah to supporting your community. Second, Susie and Carla deserve better tools. Let me explain. 

In the article, Carla’s awe, adoration, and gratitude to Susie is on full display:

Susie’s excellence makes my work better, and while I also believe that should be everyone’s objective when collaborating on a creative pursuit, she’s in a different league. Susie is also a compassionate, funny, and attentive friend, and I’m lucky to get to break bread with her on and off set.

Producing a cookbook requires, at minimum, an author and photographer, and, at maximum, a food stylist, creative producer, PAs +. It’s abundantly clear this effort is the product of meaningful collaboration. But when we pull back the curtain on the financial model, incentive structures obfuscate contribution and ownership levels of the finished product. When an author sells a cookbook, they earn royalties after they cover their advance. When a food stylist works on a cookbook, they earn royalties after they cover their advance a set fee no matter the success of the book. When a photographer works on a cookbook, they earn royalties after they cover their advance a set fee no matter the success of the book, and so on…

If a cookbook is celebrated as a collaborative effort, why isn’t everyone incentivized by its success? In today’s financial system, fractionalizing monetization of an asset is extremely complicated. It limits our ability to create and collaborate, which, as we now know, is core to the food industry. 

In a different world, monetization could be programmably split between contributors to embrace the collective production of cultural artifacts like cookbooks. This could happen between authors and food stylists (like the above example), between bartenders who contributed specs to a bar’s cocktail book, or between various owners of family recipes and cultural archives to preserve the culinary history of a region. A financial infrastructure that enables fractional monetization will transform the way we think about collaboratively produced assets. 

Back to Carla and Susie: imagine Susie hosts an event for emerging food stylists and Carla’s cookbook (the book Susie worked on) serves as the entry ticket to the event. This would strengthen Susie’s connection with her community by sharing valuable insights and sell more copies of the cookbook, each of which she now gets a cut of. This would also help Carla share the burden of marketing the cookbook, which often entails a consuming cross-country book tour that takes her away from other projects. In this new world, shared ownership and aligned incentives means more book sales, more people cooking delicious things, and a more sustainable culinary ecosystem. 

And this is where I tell you: yes, we’re building that ecosystem. 

Food for thought

When you spend as much time with culinary creators as I do, you hear over and over again that “no recipe is original”. The freedom with which this phrase is uttered is almost surprising given how sensitive (understandably) creators are about their work being copied and monetized without proper credit. 

I don’t need to explain that this is a half thought. If you want it to be closer to a three-quarter thought, let me know in the comments.

Google, Ina, and Ferrari (quite the group, right?) all started somewhere. I’m so lucky to have friends and family supporting me on this journey, many of whom are probably reading this right now (HI). After leaving my job last October, moving to London in March to participate in an accelerator, and now being back stateside, every new conversation in my life starts with: “How’s Roux going?”. They want to play with the product, read about us in Eater, and buy the tote bag. But damn — first we need to incorporate, split founder equity, pick just the right blue, set up expense categories, define values, capture all the amazing conversations we’ve had about the future of food culture in ways that feel actionable, decide which AI products we’re going to use, choose an L2, fundraise omg fundraise, figure out what roles we hire for and which we fake along the way, surf Reddit to estimate the cost of an office before I lose half a day to a salesperson, decide if IG is over, become a thought leader while also being an actual leader, did I mention fundraise?, trojan horse crypto values, read TC but don’t let it dim my light, find a megaphone, and create a work environment where people have that fire in their bellies to create that product, brand, and community that make you want to wear the tote bag. 

I’ve already knocked off more than half of that list. This newsletter will mostly be about the product, brand, and community, but I’m going to throw in some of the other stuff, too. Not because I need an outlet, but because it makes the story so much richer. It’s the same reason you don’t need another glossy cheese pull on your feed, but you always welcome BTS of the mozzarella shop in Bensonhurst that makes their mozz fresh every morning. The history, the people, and the nuance make it all the more delicious. Thanks for reading, and welcome to Cooking Roux.