One of the challenges in explaining what we’re building at Roux is that people don’t even realize our vision is possible (oof, just typing that gets me excited). This article starts a series in which I push current situations in the culinary world through the Roux extruder to simply show you the world before and after Roux.
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.