Our Mission is Simple:
cook better.
We help you ditch rigid recipes,
use your cookbooks better and cook from the hip, so you can:
Save time planning, shopping, prepping, and executing delicious food for yourself and your loved ones
Save money (because you’re wasting less food!) In the US we waste 31% of our grocery cart every week.
Shop seasonally, without a list, at any market from a place of joy
Create delicious meals on demand—no perfect recipe needed
It’s better for you, your budget, and…bonus? The planet.
With expert-led culinary adventures, online classes, coaching, and free videos, we're here to make cooking more delicious and sustainable.
Cook Better. More Deliciously. For good.
Our Core Values
Diversity Drives Deliciousness
We believe with every fiber of our being that immigration, travel, and crossing borders is essential to a vibrant, and sustainable foodway in the United States and beyond.
Food, flavor, and deliciousness expands as we expand our own horizons. We do this through travel, immigration, and cross-cultural collaboration. We cannot talk about delicious food without a conversation about colonialism and the spice trade; French techniques and the dissemination of that very notion being ‘hautest of cuisine’; how we as people have migrated and created foodways; how indigenous foodways in America shape our history and present; and so much more.
Community is Crucial
We offer live classes and a community element on RecipeKick because we know that community is crucial to have success and joy in this world. And with the ever changing landscape of hyper corporate, ethically questionable social media where YOU are the product, not the platform itself, we’re looking to change that. Tech is great, but tech devoid of community is empty. We’ve built RecipeKick to hold humanity and it’s complexities at the core, with tech being a way to connect to others rather than a barrier to connection.
Savor each moment & memory
Food connects us to our senses and to our memories. We believe that life is achingly short, and that food unifies us at the table, shows us how to be present, and gives us an opportunity to nourish ourselves, our families, and our communities. We want cooking (and all the pieces that lead us to cooking) to be as full of joy as possible, and as easeful as possible. Ease and joy in the cooking process give us more space to actually be present and savor our meals with our loved ones. Fun fact? You can save up to 80 hours per year just by changing how you use a spatula in your cooking, and using our methods? Can save you over 100 additional hours per year. Let’s get delicious food into your home, and extra time to savor it.
Food Security is a Human Right
Food insecurity shouldn’t be a thing of the present, but it is. In fact 1 in 10 people in the United States experiences food insecurity at any given time. We offer free memberships to RecipeKick on their own devices to anyone on supplemental nutrition programs anywhere in the world. This includes iOS, Android, and online.
To request a free membership, simply ask in the chat box below. Be sure to leave your email!
Curiosity over Conformity
Here at RecipeKick, we want you to “embrace the elaborate souflée of your own weirdness”. What does this mean? We want you to let your tastbuds and curiosity reign over ridgid rules and ‘expectations’. We love to do this in the kitchen first because it has ripple effects into our lives and greater communities. If we can embrace differences in our diets and food culture? Embracing other differences becomes easier. Differences are what make the world go round, but also scare the ever living daylights out of people.
When each of us is the most full-flavored version of ourselves in the kitchens, we can bring that out into our lives, into our communities, and into connection with our deepest selves. Cooking is a magical tool to unlock this in ourselves and in others. We know, because we’ve facilitated over 5000 people to cook better.
We’re an academic-led company. In fact, several of our key officers are career researchers and instructors. (Ew, I know…but we’re not boring! Promise.) What this means, is we like to show our work and cite our sources and explain the greater why and the context that created that why
Our Why?
Food is inherently political. And with the current state of affairs, stating who you are isn’t just a nice thing anymore. It’s a must.
The Politics of Food isn’t about party lines. It’s about human existence. The how we grow it, the what we grow, the harvesting, the transport, the storage, the consumption. All of it is built on culture, consumption, and politics.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is at our forefront in everything we create. How we hire, how we build curriculum, and how we connect with our recipe-free methodology. We lead from that place, it is not an afterthought, it isn’t a program. We’ve built RecipeKick as a space to explore food and food culture from new lenses. Because we believe that diversity of flavors, chefs, communities, ingredients are what make the world a more delicious place. There is nothing lost when we look at new things, there is only things to be gained. There is so much food media out there that ignores cultural foodways outside of the mainstream. We abjectly refuse to do that. We come from food from a place of recipe-free not as a battle-cry against recipes, or history. But rather as a bridge to new foodways outside of those known to you.
We’re also and LGBTQ+ Owned and Centered Company: We center much of our work, company culture, methods, and more from a queer lens because of this. The Courageous Cooking Method is inherently queer, as it is a way to work against the status quo of food culture.
This does not mean we don’t welcome people who identify outside of this spectrum—in fact, most of our clients are not LGBTQ+—but we center from this lens as a clear nod to history and the way in which the queer community has shaped the hospitality and food world (much of which has been buried by the loss of 10%+ of all gay men in the AIDS epidemic in the 80s). Gay men were many of the the early, influential hospitalians, the restauranteurs, the barkeeps. They worked in hospitality because it was one of the few jobs they could access, and in many ways these contributions were erased due to the massive loss of life during the ADIS epidemic. You can read more about this in John Birdsall’s work.
What Drove Us to Define these Values?
Impact Beyond Revenue
The modern ‘find a recipe’ then ‘find the ingredients’ way of feeding our families is failing us & the planet. Encouraging year-round industrial agricultural food systems; and isolates homecooks and our families from the rhythms of seasons.
In the United States alone…
Planning, shopping, and cooking accounts for a up to 30% of a household's total carbon footprint.
And each year….
Feeding our families accounts for up to 100 trillion hours of unpaid labor (75%+ done by women)
31.9% of our total food purchases is wasted, adding over 53 billion pounds of waste to landfills
Our BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal) is to build RecipeKick to a unicorn status company, and to 8 million members. If we are successful?
Our users will collectively...
Save over 640 Billion+ hours PER YEAR in meal-prepping/planning while still cooking as much as they normally do
Keep a minimum of 4.8 billion pounds of food waste out of our landfills per year, and
Make a signifant dent in the total global GHG emissions that emerge exclusively from the food system (both personal and industrial), which accounts for 30% of total emissions worldwide.
Including over 51 million tons of CO2 emissions could be avoided each year just in less grocery store trips required hunting for that ‘missing ingredient’.