Recipe content is one of the most consistently underused tools a food or wellness brand has — and one of the most consistently done wrong. The recipes themselves are often good, and the real problem is almost never cooking knowledge or creativity. It’s that recipe writing for a brand is a fundamentally different task from recipe writing for yourself, and most brands approach it as if it isn’t.
The recipe that you developed because you love it, that uses the product the way you’d naturally use it in your own kitchen, written with the level of detail you personally find useful — that recipe is not the same thing as a recipe that works for your audience, showcases your product properly, and makes someone want to try it rather than scroll past. Closing that gap is what recipe development as a professional service actually involves, and it’s important to understand what goes into it, whether you’re developing recipes yourself or considering bringing someone in to do it properly.
The most common way brand recipes go wrong
In the work I do developing recipes for food, drink and wellness brands, the same problems come up time and again — and they tend to appear together.
The most common one: the product barely features. The recipe exists, and somewhere in it, the product appears, but it could be replaced with any equivalent and nobody would notice. For a brand, this is the central failure. A recipe developed specifically for your product should make the product the reason the dish works: the ingredient that contributes something distinctive, that changes the texture or the flavour in a way that’s worth showing, that the audience would actually need to buy in order to replicate it. If the recipe works just as well without it, the recipe isn’t doing its job.
The second is a level of complexity that doesn’t match the audience. This one is surprisingly common even among brands whose whole positioning is around simplicity or accessibility. The founder knows the product deeply, cooks with it naturally, and writes a recipe that reflects their own confidence in the kitchen — with techniques or ingredient combinations that feel effortless to them and intimidating or confusing to their customer. A recipe that the target audience looks at and thinks “I’m not sure I could make that” or “this seems tasty, but it’s not worth my time” is not a recipe that converts, regardless of how good it tastes.
The third (and the one that ties the other two together) is writing for yourself rather than your customer. This shows up in the level of detail, the assumed knowledge, the tone, the occasions the recipe is designed for, the dietary considerations that are or aren’t highlighted, and the amount of time the recipe realistically takes. All of those decisions get made, consciously or not, based on the writer’s own preferences and context. When those don’t match the reader’s, the recipe feels off — not wrong enough to be obviously bad, just not quite right enough to do its job properly.
What a brand recipe actually needs to do
Before thinking about how to write a recipe, it’s worth being clear on what it needs to achieve. A brand recipe is a piece of content that needs to do several things simultaneously: showcase the product or service in a way that’s honest, realistic and appetising, demonstrate a use case the target audience will find relevant and accessible, build trust in the brand’s knowledge and expertise, and ideally prompt someone to buy, book, or simply reach for the product more often than they currently do.
That’s a different brief from “here is how to make a nice dish”. It means every element of the recipe (like the choice of dish itself, the ingredients it’s paired with, the level of complexity, the occasion it’s designed for, the way the product is introduced and described) should be decided in the context of those goals, not just in the context of what tastes good.
This is where the gap between personal recipe writing and professional recipe development tends to be most visible. Choosing the right recipe for a brand, before a single word is written, requires understanding the product thoroughly, understanding the audience, and understanding what the content needs to achieve. Getting that wrong at the concept stage means no amount of good writing or pretty photos will make the recipe work for the brand (and please note that here “work” doesn’t mean “go viral on social media”, because a recipe video or post can go viral and still change nothing in terms of brand awareness or ROI).
The structure of a recipe that works
Once the concept is right, structure matters more than most people expect. A recipe that’s hard to follow — where the reader loses track of things, gets confused by ambiguous instructions, or finds that a step doesn’t match what they actually have in front of them — reflects on the brand, not just the recipe.
A few things that consistently make recipes clearer and easier to follow:
1) The ingredient list needs a clear, consistent logic (whatever that looks like for your brand or style).
Some recipe developers list from largest quantity to smallest, others follow the order ingredients are used, others group by component or category. None of those is wrong. What doesn’t work is a list that has no discernible order at all, where the reader is scanning back and forth trying to find what they need while something is already cooking in the pan. The logic itself matters less than the fact that there is one.
It’s also important to remember that people don’t all learn or cook the same way. A format that feels completely intuitive to you might be confusing for someone else — and that’s not a failure on either part. If you’re getting the same question or complaint repeatedly about a recipe, that’s useful feedback worth paying attention to. Apart from that, picking a method and applying it consistently is the best you can do.
One more thing that often gets overlooked: if you work with different people on recipe writing over time (a developer for one campaign, someone else for another), some variation in style is natural and fine. What creates a poor reader experience is significant inconsistency within the same body of content, like one set of recipes that gives full method detail and timing alongside another set that lists only ingredients with no instructions. Within a consistent overall standard, there’s plenty of room for individual style to vary.
2) Where possible, instructions that tell you what the food should look, smell, or feel like (not just what to do or for how long) give the cook a real target rather than a countdown.
“Cook for five minutes” is a perfectly useful instruction when timing is the right cue. But “cook until the onions are translucent and just starting to turn golden brown” is a different kind of instruction — one that works regardless of the heat level, the pan, or the particular onion. Combining timing with a sensory cue, where it makes sense to do so, tends to produce more reliable results for the reader.
The same principle applies to variables the recipe writer takes for granted, but the reader doesn’t. In bread recipes, for instance, I always include notes like “add the water gradually and check the dough as you go — you may not need all of it, or you may need a little more, depending on your flour and how you’re kneading.” That kind of note gets left out of recipes constantly, and it’s one of the main reasons an otherwise well-written recipe produces inconsistent results at home. An experienced cook absorbs those variables intuitively. Someone earlier in their cooking journey doesn’t, and writing assuming they should is one of the ways recipes fail their readers.
3) Prep notes in the ingredient list rather than buried in the method.
If a recipe calls for 200 g of pumpkin cut into small cubes, that information belongs with the ingredient, not in step four when the reader is already mid-cook and the pumpkin is still whole on the counter. Beyond the obvious practical problem, prep notes in the method interrupt the flow of the instruction at exactly the moment you want the reader focused on what they’re doing. Listing them upfront also encourages the reader to do their mise en place before they start, which makes the whole cooking experience smoother and reduces the chance of something going wrong because an ingredient wasn’t ready in time.
Writing the recipe to match your audience
The right level of complexity isn’t the simplest possible or the most impressive possible: it’s whatever matches the actual cooking confidence and kitchen context of your target customer. For some brands, that means four-ingredient recipes with one-pan methods. For others, it means more complex techniques that position the product as something worth taking seriously in the kitchen. Neither is inherently better; what matters is the match.
A few practical ways to check whether a recipe is pitched right: would someone in your target audience have all of these ingredients at home, or would they need to go to a special shop? Would they have the equipment the method requires? Would they recognise all of the techniques described, or does something need a line of explanation? Is it possible to include notes like “if you don’t have this, you can use that”? Would the stated timing feel realistic to them, or are you estimating based on your own speed in a familiar kitchen?
These are the kind of testing and adjustments that professional recipe development actually involves. A recipe that hasn’t been tested properly (by someone who knows how to evaluate it against the audience it’s written for) tends to have small errors that create a disproportionate amount of frustration at home.
Recipe writing and food photography: the connection most brands miss
There’s a relationship between how a recipe is written and how the finished dish photographs, which is important to understand if you’re creating content as well as recipes. Recipes that produce dishes with interesting textures, visible layers, or naturally appealing surfaces (the kind of results that come partly from deliberate styling decisions built into the method itself) are significantly easier to photograph well than recipes that produce something delicious but visually “meh”.
This is a consideration I bring into recipe development from both sides — having developed recipes professionally and photographed food and drinks for brands across many product categories. The decisions made at the recipe level (how the dish is assembled, what temperature it’s served at, what garnishes or finishing touches are part of the method rather than afterthoughts) have a direct impact on the visual result. When those two processes are joined up, the content tends to be stronger than when recipe development and photography happen separately with no conversation between them.
There’s more on how food science affects what food looks like on camera in the rest of my blog.
When to develop recipes yourself and when to bring someone in
There’s real value in a brand owner or practitioner writing their own recipes, particularly in the early stages of building an audience. It’s authentic, it reflects genuine knowledge and preference, and it builds the kind of trust that comes from a consistent personal voice. If recipe writing is something you enjoy and do well, and your audience is responding to it, that’s worth continuing.
Where professional recipe development tends to make more sense is when recipe content is a significant part of the brand’s marketing output and needs to be consistent, frequent, and optimised — when there isn’t time to develop and test recipes properly alongside everything else, or when the content isn’t working despite genuine effort. A recipe developer who also understands the brand’s audience, the product’s behaviour in cooking, and how the content will be used (across social media, a website, a newsletter, packaging) brings a different kind of efficiency to the process than someone working from instinct alone.
Recipe development as part of a wider content strategy
A single well-developed recipe rarely exists on its own: it typically needs photography, a format adapted for the platform it will be published on, a caption or introduction that contextualises it for the audience, and sometimes a short-form video showing the method. When all of those elements are planned together rather than handled separately, the result is more coherent and less time-consuming to create.
This is the way I approach recipe development for my clients. It’s part of a wider content conversation, thinking about where the recipe will be used, how it will be photographed, and what it needs to achieve for the brand before it’s written. The recipe is basically the starting point, not the end product.
Working with a recipe developer
I develop recipes for food, drink, and wellness brands: from product launch recipes and seasonal campaign content to ongoing recipe libraries for social media and newsletters. My background and experience include chemistry, nutrition, and marketing, as well as food photography, styling and content creation, which means I think about recipes from both the food science angle (what’s actually happening in the dish, and why) and the visual angle.
If recipe content is something you’re producing regularly and it’s not doing the job it should — whether because the recipes don’t reflect the product properly, aren’t connecting with your audience, or simply aren’t presented in a way that does them justice, get in touch using the button below.
A MATTER OF NOURISHMENT 