For much of the past two decades, recipe blogs have been a growing space for independent culinary creators to share their ideas, build community, and sometimes even make serious money. The online recipe space grew rapidly in the mid-2000s and beyond as tens of thousands of freelance creators used push-button online publishing platforms like WordPress to build viable businesses and monetize search-driven advertising, merchandise sales, and recipe books.
However, as in many online businesses, AI has changed everything and disrupted the model as Google moves from traditional SEO referrals to AI-driven summaries, and consumers are increasingly making AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude their first automation in their shopping journey.
This shift has created a growing divide, with some creators seeing 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, founder and CTO of Allspice, believes the answer is not to resist AI, but to rethink how it is used. In his view, AI should not replace the creator, but rather allow the creator to focus on his work while the AI handles everything else.
“As a creator, you have to do what people come to you for, which is your creativity, your voice, your specific recipes,” he said. “Stick to that, and let these AI components help with everything else around you.”
In other words, let AI handle the mundane, non-creative parts of running a recipe business. That includes serving as an answer engine for recurring questions, using the content of the recipe itself.
“That’s the next step, where we answer all the questions that people send in,” Templeton said. “If someone asks a question that’s already written on the blog, you get the right answer.”
Part of the challenge, he says, is that recipes, as an informational organizing unit, aren’t really designed for the modern Internet world.
“Everyone has a different way of writing recipes,” says Templeton. “Some people write directly in the notebook, while others write down what they have.”
Templeton’s company is trying to fix that by building an organized layer beneath recipes, mapping messy, inconsistent input into a format that can power features like guided cooking, pantry tracking, and smarter shopping. The company works with partners like Pinecone to do this, with the ultimate goal of turning recipes into something dynamic and interactive.
The ability to use AI to turn a creator-generated recipe into a guided cooking experience underscores how much has changed in 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 can turn a regular internet recipe into a quick guided cooking experience.
It remains to be seen how the wider community of recipe creators will embrace the tools of companies like Bakespace (and Bakebot), Allspice, and SideChef as they move into 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 defined two decades ago.
You can hear my full interview with Will by clicking play below or going to The Spoon Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.