The key to earning from recipes isn’t the food
In 2017, the team from Sir Kensington’s made an estimated US$140 million for their ketchup recipe when they sold it to Unilever.
The same year, Nathan Myhrvold, a technology expert-turnedexperimental chef, released the five-volume “Modernist Bread” (Cooking Lab, $560), co-authored by Francisco Migoya. It’s Myhrvold’s latest juggernaut; he coauthored the bestselling “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking” (Cooking Lab, $625) in 2011. Before that, he was the chief technology officer at Microsoft.
That was a good year for bigticket food projects. But it came when recipes are being continually devalued as they flood the internet, free of charge. Social media has made it ever easier for people to copy the dishes of others. It makes me wonder: How can someone monetize a recipe?
Myhrvold, who is starting work on his next opus, “Modernist Pizza,” has strong feelings about recipe ownership and the money it represents. If music and poetry can be copyrighted and monetized, he thinks singular recipes should be, too.
There’s one problem: In the U.S., most recipes aren’t legally protected by copyright. That’s because they essentially contain only ingredient names and proportions.
“Copyright law does not protect merely utilitarian articles, ideas, facts, or formulas. Since food is a useful article, copyright law will apply only if the food incorporates highly creative features that are separable (either physically or conceptually) from the food’s utilitarian features,” says Natasha Reed, copyright expert at New York’s Foley Hoag law firm.
So, is there a case for the monetizing of recipes? Myhrvold draws analogies from his former technology job — and decries the blatant plagiarizing of dishes. Myhrvold tells the story of putting fonts into the Windows program when he was at Microsoft decades ago.
“There are thousands of different font designs. They are a collection of numbers that plot the design. According to a court ruling, they’re not protected, though the font names are,” says Myhrvold.
“The co-ordinates of the points, which you’d put into a computer program like proportions in a recipe, are not protected. It’s messed up, but it’s the law.”
Similarly, consider the Cronut. The technique for frying up a doughnut with croissant-like layers isn’t protected, but pastry chef Dominique Ansel did trademark the name and has aggressively pursued knock-offs. And Pepperidge Farm took Trader Joe’s to court over alleged infringement of its Milano cookies.
Trademarks, though, are about protecting a brand, not actively bringing in money (unless you consider litigation and damages an active revenue source). Myhrvold points to patents as a potential way to monetize a recipe — although, for most chefs, that’s impractical. Patenting a recipe costs thousands of dollars, and it must qualify as unique and useful.
The key to raking in millions on a recipe is that it’s invariably not about the recipe.
“From the beginning, we password-protected our original recipes in text files,” says Sir Kensington’s Scott Norton, who started making ketchup with Mark Ramadan as a college project. “We absolutely saw them as our own, original work.”
Still, he admits, “Had we not started the company and proved the value in them, no one would have come along, looked at the recipes alone and seen them as anything of tremendous value without traction in the market. Sir Kensington’s team and reputation has brought us to where we are far more than our everevolving recipes have.”
Take Singapore’s $3-a-plate chicken-and-rice dish that has been valued at $2 million. Liao Fan Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice & Noodle has a Michelin star, but the true value of its renowned recipe is more than what’s in hawker Chan Hon Meng’s head.
“A street hawker recipe is dependent on the reputation it comes with, not just the sauce and techniques,” says KF Seetoh, an Asian-food tour expert.
Seetoh estimates that hawker recipes can command from $250,000 to many millions, provided they can carry the popular lustre to whomever might buy it. The most expensive hawker recipe known today in Singapore is Kay Lee Roast Meats, whose honey pork and roast duck recipes sold for more than $5 million. “A few hundred portions a day at a humble $4 to $6 price, in a lowrent space with minimum manpower, is very sexy for investors,” he says.