The case for consumers

I love listening. I always have. As a kid, when my extended family got together for dinner, there was always lots of debating, yelling (lovingly), and laughing — but because I was the youngest, it took me a minute (ahem, a couple years) to feel comfortable chiming in. In the meantime, I developed a knack for really listening to people and connecting the dots of disparate conversations, thoughts, and arguments - all in my head.  

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?