A huge THANK-YOU to the Cookpad community! Your recipes have planted 95,039 trees!
And that’s just the start. For every recipe shared on Cookpad in November and December, we’re donating a tree to #TeamTrees.

And this is the first time ever that the whole Cookpad community has come together. So our Cookpad communities from 74 countries around the world are all sharing recipes to plant more trees.

A little bit about why we’re doing it…

It all started with a conversation about how a few of us were trying to go carbon neutral. Like many people we’re really worried about climate change and what’s happening to our planet. We know we can make a difference in our own lives… but sometimes that doesn’t feel like it will make much difference. What difference can one person make when the problem is so big? And this is a conversation that we found echoed by friends and in our Cookpad community.
Then Aki found the #TeamTrees campaign. We loved it for two reasons: 1) planting trees is a really practical, effective way to cut net carbon dioxide emissions 2) it’s all about raising awareness and spreading the word to as many people as possible.

We believe that when we cook and the choices we make when we cook (like what ingredients we use) can make a positive difference to the health of the planet.
So we decided to donate a tree for every recipe. Everyday all of your recipes shared on Cookpad help people enjoy cooking more and now they also give a little bit back to the planet!

95,039 trees planted! was originally published in From the Cookpad Team on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The impact that our use of technology has on our mental and emotional well-being is an ongoing challenge for tech companies. There have been some moves to mitigate the problem: for example, the latest releases of both iOS and Android have features that give users better visibility of how their time is spent on their phones and new controls over how to manage that time. It’s a step forward but the controls are typically hidden deep in within the Settings menu.

It’s something that we think a lot about at Cookpad: our focus is on designing products for which the real measure of success is offline behaviour. Are our users putting down their devices and spending more time enjoying their lives? Even though, for now, the phone is the primary interface.

We’ve developed our own Cookpad design principles to keep us on track and make sure that we always stay true to that. Our design is a path to cooking.

It comes down to one simple question: does it help people cook?

This then breaks down to:

• Is the user in control of their experience on the platform?
• Does this help users to develop their cooking skills and confidence
• Are we creating quality connections between users?

A standard analytics-based approach is easy: reach, conversion, retention, churn etc. And if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, right? But these questions are about experience and impact: they are not easy things to measure.

The temptation can be to focus on the things that are the easiest to measure. They are numbers you can hide behind when asking whether a product is actually delivering real value to users. But high usage metrics are not necessarily an indication of happy users.

We need a better balance of qualitative measures to complement pure analytics to know if we’re delivering real value or not.

For us that meant going back to our mission: to make everyday cooking fun. Fun is a subjective word. So we needed to figure out what this means in practice for people. For us, it’s ended up being similar to Tony Hsieh’s description of happiness. It comes down to: control, progress, connection and purpose or meaning.

For Cookpad, these translate as:

• Cooking allows me to take control of what I eat [Control]
• I learn new skills and techniques through Cookpad [Progress]
• On Cookpad I feel supported by and connected to other people [Connection]
• I share on Cookpad because I want to help others enjoy cooking[Meaning]

This gives us a measure similar to NPS.
We use a similar methodology: we’re measuring our users’ agreement with these statements and building it into the app. It’s our ‘Net Fun Score’. We’re just starting to deploy it so we’ll figure out over the next couple of months what the results tell us and then how we can improve.

This focus on real impact — and not on easy metrics — means we’ve changed the way we develop OKRs and even how we structure our teams. Everything comes back to our users and their experience: control, progress, connection and meaning. This means we stay aligned: everyone’s pulling in the same direction of the mission and focusing on what really matters.

Cookpad is hiring. Find out more here.

The real success of a digital product is measured offline was originally published in From the Cookpad Team on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The investment bank UBS recently released a report on the ‘mega-trend’ of online food ordering. The title of the 82-page report is a not-too-subtle hint at their prediction of the eventual outcome. The report is called “Is the Kitchen Dead?”

The bank estimates that the food delivery sales market could increase from $35bn today to $365bn by 2030. That’s a compound annual growth rate of more than 20%. You can see why an investment bank is excited by that. It’s all down to a convergence of the on-demand and sharing economy with “time-starved and asset-light consumers”. A perfect storm which, according to the report, means it’s possible that “by 2030 most meals currently cooked at home are instead ordered online and delivered from either restaurants or central kitchens.”

That’s the objective for many food delivery companies: that every meal we eat is delivered to us. Food delivery companies aren’t food businesses: they are transport businesses. And it’s the disruption of technology on the transport sector that first enabled food delivery to become cheaper. Add to that the cheap labour market, ‘dark kitchens’ (that make restaurant food only for delivery); and, pretty soon, robot chefs and drone delivery … and the costs get lower and lower.

According to the report, this is “the first stage of industrialising meal production and delivery.” Delivery of restaurant-quality food becomes so cheap that, to use the UBS phrase, “Home cooking could evaporate.”

Is that possible? Will we all only ever eat food prepared and delivered by someone — or more likely, something — else? Well, technology makes it possible for sure: removing the ‘friction’ of creativity and creation with a low-cost and convenient alternative. And a whole meal ordered on your phone, cooked by a robot and delivered by a drone does sound like a cartoon-version of the future.

The thing is: people don’t make decisions based only on cost and convenience.

Even as the cost of food delivery gets lower and lower, people will still choose to cook. There’s a reason (well, actually there are a few) why cooking is a fundamental behaviour in every community on the planet. Its origins lie in the practical need to make food more digestible. But its value stretches way beyond that: providing connection to each other and our world.

In its celebration of the ‘mega trend’ of online food delivery, the report ignores another emerging trend. Using the term coined by the economist Carlota Perez, it’s the ‘smart green lifestyle’: the potential trigger to secure sustainable, inclusive economic growth. This includes the aspiration for good health, the move towards organic and locally-sourced fresh foods, the adoption of environmentally-friendly lifestyles, and for the ‘anti-mass production’ sentiment, particularly evident in food production and consumption.

Home cooking is the behaviour that connects all of these. It means we can make our own choices and we can choose to have a positive impact on our health, on the local economy, on the environment. It puts us in control. It’s an essential part of the food production ecosystem of the future.

The UBS report acknowledges that there are some “uncertainties” that may prevent their prediction of the future from coming true: from smart appliances to cooking apps to health crises such as obesity.

These aren’t uncertainties; these are realities. And this is where the immediate potential disruption by technology on the food sector truly lies: helping with the parts of the cooking process that are time-consuming like buying ingredients and food prep or difficult like developing the skills and confidence to cook.

There is of course a much bigger role for technology in the transformation of our food systems that are broken, unsustainable for both people and planet. But even our own everyday choices about what to eat and what to cook can have a positive impact.

The kitchen’s not dead. It’s evolving. And we need to do everything we can to help it live and flourish for the benefit of our — and the planet’s — collective health.

Is the kitchen dead? was originally published in From the Cookpad Team on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Cookpad was founded 21 years ago in Japan by Aki Sano. Now almost 100 million people around the world use Cookpad every month and over 4 million recipes have been created on the platform. It’s available in almost 70 countries around the world in 23 languages.

So how did Aki come up with idea behind Cookpad? I asked him that question when I first interviewed with him for this role and it’s a good story. It’s not the ‘solving a personal problem’ slick PR answer you hear from a lot of tech companies. And while we can sum it up in a couple of lines, there are a few more layers to it. So here’s the longer version of how Cookpad started.

So, Aki, what’s the story? Why did you set up Cookpad?

The story starts a long time before I actually started the business. When I was at university, I came to realise that there are three things that can create significant change in society: technology, people’s beliefs and politics.

Each of those three things shapes our society and changes its course.

I’ve always liked technology. I’ve always had a clear sense of how technology impacts our lives and can deliver our vision of the future.

I’ve never really liked politics or change that stems from regulation. I like grassroots movements but I see top-down decision-making as very limited, and it often has a negative impact.

I hate judging something without having first-hand knowledge of it. That doesn’t get you anywhere: I believe you learn by doing. If you try it yourself, then you’re able to improve it. So I started exploring the world of policy and regulation via the world of non-governmental organisations.

Because I was interested in alternative energy …

… You were?

Yeah, I built a solar-powered car in high school and I was studying alternative energy at university and very involved in that scene. We had a Solar Summer Camp one year.

Anyway, because of that, the easiest way to get involved was through the renewables agenda. I ended up at the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) conference in New York. The CSD is responsible for the implementation of Agenda 21, the follow-up to the Earth Summit in Rio.

Wow, that must have been pretty cool.

Honestly, the conference was pretty dull. Countries disagreeing over certain words in sub-clauses … that kind of thing. It was really slow progress.

But while I was there, I got to meet some interesting people. One was Abdu from Antigua and Barbuda in the West Indies.

The thing you noticed about Abdu was his smile. It seemed to come from a deep sense of happiness. It made me think ‘That’s what I want to do: help people find that state of happiness and wellbeing.’

Did you ask Abdu what made him happy?

Of course! I asked him lots of questions. He’d studied in the US and now lived back in Antigua where he had a farm. He explained how the island had had a difficult time, rebuilding after independence and with natural disasters like hurricanes. He told me about his farm which he cultivated with very natural systems and using permaculture. It also had lots of trees… which blew my mind because I was used to farms in the US and Japan that are designed purely for economic value so have no trees at all.

Everything that I believed would create a better future like electric cars or economic success had nothing to do with Abdu’s happiness. It was completely different. Whereas I believed happiness would come from doing more, here was proof that happiness came from doing less.

I could pretty much hear the sound of all my values and everything I believed in come crashing down around me.

That’s going to make you rethink your life choices.

Yes, it really did. When I got back to Japan, I dropped out of university for a while. (It’s easy to do in Japan — we work really hard to get to university, then it’s a pretty easy life when you’re there!) I just couldn’t carry on. I did really feel at a loss. So I stayed by the beach, living simply and reflecting a lot on the kind of life I wanted to live, and the kind of contribution I wanted to make. I was almost afraid to do anything because I thought everything can have a negative impact. I thought about living a self-sufficient life — just in a simple house growing my own vegetables. But then I kind of had too much energy for that and wanted to have an impact.

One day I was in the local store, buying some food. And looking at the tomatoes, I just thought: why do I have to buy this tomato imported from far away when there are tomatoes being grown down the road by the farmer? For the first time in about a year, this seemed like a simple, clear choice to me: buying tomatoes from the local farm would be better than buying imported, overly packaged ones.

It sounds simple but it’s not straightforward to actually do.

Of course, you have to find a farmer and agree a price… but I thought at least I could make it easier for people to buy that tomato so as to balance things up a bit.

I had a friend who knew some of the local farmers; and I knew the students at the university. So I started to sell produce from the local farmers on campus. At first I created a mailing list for everyone on campus and some people would place orders; the farmer would park his truck at one of the gates and people would come pick up their order. If there was anything left, we’d sell that to anyone passing by.

Word of mouth spread fast and pretty soon it was really popular. I built a website because doing the orders via a spreadsheet was painful! I set up more pick-up points … the bigger it got, the more problems there were. It seemed to me that there was something wrong in the design. I kept it going for about two years.

How come only two years?

Well, it got to the time when I needed to graduate from university. Which I wasn’t really looking forward to: it’s a big change.

My friends were either joining companies or going to grad school. I figured that it was better to be in control of your own destiny so set up my own company. I was also intrigued by the concept of corporations: an entity that has this independence and is a separate being in its own right. So I set up my own business, COIN.

Why did you call it COIN?

The name has a few different meanings.

It comes from words or rather ideas that I love: CO from community and collaboration; IN from innovation and interaction.

It also of course relates to money. What is money? It’s about the exchange of value; and the keeping and growing of value. But exchanging smaller amounts seems to give greater value. For example, if you’re dealing with $100m, there’s limited accuracy; you can’t see it. But if you’re dealing with 1/100th of that… then the value is precise. I made COIN to learn more about money.

So what was the plan for COIN? What was it a business of?

I didn’t have a plan for what COIN would actually do…

Really?

Really! I had lots of ideas. The three that got closest to being real were: selling vegetables, building on what I’d learned before; something around housing which I’m really interested in too; and the idea that eventually became Cookpad. I did all three for a while as side projects while I had a job that paid me too!

How did the idea for Cookpad come about?

I learned a lot from selling vegetables online. The logistics were not easy. And also people aren’t used to eating locally and seasonally anymore. There’s not that connection to the local environment or community. So it can seem boring to only have the same kinds of vegetables for three months at a time. It gets repetitive! But when I ate with the farmers’ families they would use their own seasonal produce and they had so many creative ways to enjoy the same produce. It was incredible.

Cooking is the behaviour that helps that. But it’s seen as a chore.

I was really lucky growing up: I lived in a family that got together every day around the dinner table. We have to eat, right?

Coming together over meals gave us not just the nourishment from our food but also from each other. When I visited my friends’ houses, it wasn’t the same; it was often disconnected and unhealthy physically and emotionally.

Food is undervalued and cooking is part of that…

When we choose to cook, it’s a choice that has an impact on ourselves, the people we cook for, the growers and producers we buy from and the wider environment.

I figured if I could help people to enjoy everyday cooking, then I would have a positive impact on the world.

And how come Cookpad won out over the other ideas?

It didn’t for a while! Cookpad started out as a subscription business: $5/ month to put your recipe on the platform. I think it was a 6 or 12 month subscription as that was the runway.

Wait… people subscribed to put their recipe on the platform, not to access recipes? That’s different.

Yes. I focused on people who like to cook. Cooking is an incredibly creative process… but it’s naturally followed by destruction right? I think it’s the only creative process where you destroy your own creation. In a good way because you eat it. I was trying to capture that element of creativity.

The other great part of cooking is when you get a response from people. If you’re cooking every day for the same people, maybe you’re no longer getting the same level of response.

How did you know Cookpad would work? How many users did you get in the first three months?

Well, the target was 50,000 users in the first two months… in reality, it was 100 users in the first three months…

Oh wow, that’s missing the target slightly!

Yes! I thought ‘maybe this isn’t going to work’…

So I wrote to all the subscribers and asked how they’d like their money back.

By the way, remember this was 1998 so not only was it dial-up internet we had to manage subscriptions via the post!

Anyway, most people said ‘You don’t need to return the money. I love this! How much do I need to pay to keep the service going?!’

So what did you do?

I made Cookpad free. And actually called it Cookpad — it had been called Kitchen@Coin. I also refocused the scope so it was much simpler.

And it was still a ‘passion project’? When did you start to focus completely on Cookpad?

Yes. I didn’t quit my job for another couple of years… 2002 I think. I read the book ‘Good to Great’ and that really resonated with me. The example companies in there may not have stood the test of time but the principles have.

I figured it was time to either commit to Cookpad or let it go. I believed it could have a positive impact on the world. So I quit my job and my other projects to focus completely on Cookpad. I updated the infrastructure to enable the platform to scale. And the community started to grow. By 2003, we reached 1 million users in Japan which was a great milestone. Especially when you consider that the biggest cooking magazine at that time had 700k subscribers.

And then the community just kept growing…

So, that’s the story behind Cookpad. Well, at least our first six years :)

The story behind Cookpad: how the platform used by 100 million people got started was originally published in From the Cookpad Team on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Culture… It’s something that companies obsess over: the secret sauce to growth, powering talent attraction and retention. Lots of smart things have been written about how to build a strong culture/ how not to. This post can’t compete with those but this week I learned something new about culture.

One of my roles at Cookpad is to help tell the story of the company. As part of that, I’ve been trying to capture what it is to work here: what is the culture at Cookpad? To quote Frederic Laloux in ‘Reinventing organizations’, culture is ‘something in the air… the character of an organization.’ It’s hard to define. Our UK team is about a year old now — we’re in a unique position of being a start-up but with a heritage of 21 years. We haven’t ‘defined’ the culture of the company yet. But of course, even at just one year old, we have a company culture. It grew almost without us knowing.

I spent a couple of happy hours talking on camera about working at Cookpad to some of my colleagues. They shared two essential traits:

1. a complete aversion to being on camera, and
2. a complete passion for the mission.

The importance of everyone ‘pulling in the same direction’ and ‘making a big positive difference’ became very clear. We’re lucky that we have an awesome, inspiring founder. But the culture isn’t something set by him: it’s something that’s grown organically. At its heart is the mission of the company. Because it’s that mission which has attracted this group of people, and it’s their shared behaviours and concerns that have evolved into our culture.

Apart from being mission-driven, the other traits that the team value in each other are:

• a solution mindset — our colleagues are smart and talented with lots of different skills but what sets them apart is that they are focused on finding the best solutions with no preconceptions about the right answer
• a personal authenticity — people are their authentic selves at Cookpad which makes the environment happy and friendly, open and honest

So what did I learn about culture?

That everyone in the team contributes. And it’s the power of this collective that is our secret sauce.

Our culture lives and breathes. We’re starting to figure out how to help it flourish — from the supporting processes and practices we put in place to how we articulate our values. It will always have the mission at its heart but, as any living thing, it will evolve.

Lessons in company culture: defining the indefinable was originally published in From the Cookpad Team on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Most tech companies have a mission, from ‘organising the world’s information’ to ‘enabling people to live on other planets’. But not many — if any — have stated that upon completion of the mission, the company will dissolve.

But that is exactly what Cookpad has done. And at the Shareholders’ Meeting last month, it was made official and became part of our Articles of Incorporation.

Articles of Incorporation are pretty dull: a necessary legal document that acts as a public record of the company with details on governance etc. In most places, the Articles are required to state the company’s purpose. Usually this gets defined pretty broadly so that the company can keep its options open. Here’s an example: “The purpose of the corporation is to engage in any lawful act or activity for which corporations may be organized under the General Corporation Law of the State of Delaware.”

That comes from Amazon’s Articles of Incorporation. Which is the same as Facebook’s. Tesla mixes it up a bit with an acronym. (By the way, this is why Delaware is popular.)

All in all pretty standard corporate law stuff.

But the thing with corporate law is that it was made for companies who are focused only on profit. So it’s not that useful for companies whose mission is their very reason for being. The development of B Corps is starting to change that.

Cookpad is a public company and profit is important. But we believe that if we solve the problems associated with everyday cooking, profit will follow.

Here’s the translation of our new and improved Articles of Incorporation:

1.Our company exists to ‘make everyday cooking fun’ and this is our mission.

2. When everyone on the planet enjoys everyday cooking, our company will dissolve.

So we’ve actually made the ‘purpose’ clause about our purpose. Radical.

Our mission at Cookpad is to make everyday cooking fun. Because we believe that cooking is key to a happier and healthier life for people, communities and the planet. By solving the problems related to everyday cooking and inspiring people to enjoy cooking more, we believe we can help build a better world. And Cookpad exists only to fulfil that mission. Nothing more, nothing less.

It’s the second part that we’re most excited about. Once we’ve achieved our mission, the company will dissolve.

That’s right. Our goal is to make ourselves extinct. Because when we’re no longer needed, we know it’s mission accomplished.

The obvious question is how will we know when everyone on the planet is enjoying cooking everyday? How will we know when we’ve achieved our goal? We don’t know … yet. What we do know is that the world will be different and better.

The mission is something everyone at Cookpad passionately believes in. But it’s easy for a company to lose focus. Setting our mission out in this way means we won’t.

Cookpad is hiring. Find out more here.

Mission possible: what it means to be truly mission-driven was originally published in From the Cookpad Team on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.