We get a lot of phone calls and emails from food businesses asking how secure their recipes will be on ReciPal.

We explain that only your account will have access to your recipes, then go on about our security practices and lots of acronyms and concepts that food entrepreneurs rarely understand, and beyond that we don't ask for any instructions or preparation details. Basically, we do everything we can to keep your recipe safe and take it quite seriously.

The Real Value of Your Food Business

What we really want to say though is that the real value of your food business is everything BUT the recipe. Yes the recipe is a starting point. You can think of it as a prerequisite. But by itself it has almost no value.

If someone got your recipe, could they sell it? There are millions of great recipes on the internet that are totally free. So what really creates value for a food business?

• Your Branding
• Your customer base
• Your relationships with distributors, retailers, and co-packers
• Your team
• Your sales process

Moving Beyond The Recipe

It’s interesting that when we talk to more experienced food businesses, we rarely get asked about whether their recipes will be secure on ReciPal. They realize that a) their business value lies in the above mentioned areas and not their recipes, b) they aren’t going to understand how we manage security anyway.

It’s the smaller food companies that always ask. And it’s probably because at that point the recipe is all they have and that’s what they want to protect. But that’s also why they don’t have a real business yet, just an idea and a recipe.

So, we recommend trying to build that recipe into a business. The hard (and valuable) parts are what happen after you think up that recipe :)