For much of the past two decades, recipe blogs have been a burgeoning space for independent culinary creators to share their ideas, build a community, and sometimes even make serious money. The online recipe space grew rapidly in the mid-2000s onwards as tens of thousands of independent creators used push-button online publishing platforms like WordPress to create viable businesses and monetize through search-driven advertising, merch sales, and recipe books.
However, as with most online businesses, AI has changed everything and disrupted the model as Google shifted away from traditional SEO referrals to AI-powered summaries, and consumers increasingly make AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude their default first stop on their meal discovery journey.
This shift has created a growing divide, where some creators see AI as their sworn enemy, while others have begun to embrace it as part of the natural evolution of the online creator economy.
Will Templeton, co-founder and CTO of Allspice, believes the answer isn’t to resist AI, but to rethink how it’s used. In his view, AI shouldn’t replace the creator, but instead allow the creator to focus on their work while AI handles everything else.
“As a creator, you should do what people come to you for, which is your creativity, your voice, your specific recipes,” he said. “Stick to that, and then let these AI components help with everything else around that.”
In other words, let AI handle the mundane, non-creative parts of running a recipe business. That includes acting as a front-line response engine for repetitive substitution questions, leveraging the recipe content itself.
“That’s the next step, where it answers all the questions that people are sending through,” said Templeton. “When someone asks a question that’s already in the blog post, it gets the right answer.”
Part of the challenge, he argues, is that recipes, as an organizing unit for information, were not necessarily built for the modern online world.
“Everyone has a different way of writing recipes,” said Templeton. “Some people write them right by the handbook, while others are just jotting down what they have.”
Templeton’s company is trying to address that by building a structured layer beneath recipes, mapping messy, inconsistent inputs into a format that can power features like guided cooking, pantry tracking, and more intelligent shopping. The company is working with partners like Pinecone to do this, with the bigger goal of turning recipes into something more dynamic and interactive.
The ability to use AI to turn a creator-generated recipe into a guided cooking experience underscores just how much has changed over the past few years. Half a decade ago, startups like Innit and Hestan wrote big checks to develop high-production-value guided-cooking apps. Today, an AI tool like Allspice’s can turn an ordinary online recipe into an instant guided cooking experience.
It remains to be seen how the broader recipe creator community will embrace tools from companies like Bakespace (with Bakebot), Allspice, and SideChef as they move toward an AI-powered future. What is clear, however, is that the space will continue to evolve rapidly as AI tools begin to replace the search engine-driven discovery model that defined the past two decades.
You can hear my full conversation with Will by clicking play below or heading to The Spoon Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
