Pepper App 2024: Sharing’s Caring

Jake Aronskind, the Co-Founder & CEO of Pepper App, alongside his childhood friend Matt Schkolnick, created Pepper to unite home cooks worldwide. So far, they’ve already built a community of 1 million stemming from diverse backgrounds and skill levels! Their inspiration stemmed from a college group chat where friends shared their culinary creations. Over the past 3 years, they have transformed Pepper into a leading online hub for home cooks. Their mission is to enhance the cooking experience by enabling users to share their favorite meals, create digital social cookbooks, and discover recipes from around the globe. DeliveryRank finds out more.

Pepper celebrates the home cook, the seasoned chef, and everyone in between. How has this diverse community of 1 million home cooks influenced the way you approach sharing and discovering recipes?

When we first launched, we perceived the sharing and discovery of recipes as antiquated. Some people searched on Google, others shared videos on Instagram, while some dug out old, stained recipe cards from their closets. We wanted to create a platform to modernize this experience, allowing for the preservation and digital passing down of generational recipes. We envisioned a space where people could socialize around cooking. Our approach on Pepper is to enable everyone to share their recipes, viewing them all as home cooking chefs. This differentiation is key; Pepper boasts over 75,000 recipes crafted by individuals just like you, complete with tools to assist you in the kitchen, and with more recipes posted every minute!

The idea for Pepper stemmed from a group chat where friends shared what they were cooking. How has this initial concept evolved into a platform that empowers home cooks to share their favorite meals, create digital cookbooks, and explore a community of over 50,000 recipes?

When we first launched Pepper, our goal was to create a platform where everyone could share their recipes. Little did we know how much it would grow; we now have nearly 1,000,000 users globally, with more joining every day. Along the way, we've learned about the pain points experienced by the cooking and food creator communities. We're developing tools that cater to these needs, such as right now allowing anyone to create their own cookbooks on Pepper and enabling social interaction around recipes, and looking ahead, empowering food creators to engage with their followers in new ways. 

Since our initial launch, we've expanded our features significantly, including advanced search options, the ability to share your own version of any recipe, personalized recipe suggestions, and integration with Instacart for ingredient delivery. We've also introduced interactive cooking-centric recipe videos and, most recently, launched our biggest features yet. These include the ability to build and organize your own cookbook, create collections of recipes for future reference, and access our premium toolkit, Pepper Plus. It's been an incredible journey over the past two years, and we're thrilled to continue supporting our growing community.

Pepper aims to change the way people think about sharing food. How do you envision Pepper impacting the future of home cooking and recipe sharing?

First and foremost, our aim was to create a platform for consumers to share recipes. However, we quickly realized that the scope was much broader. It involved consumers sharing and discovering recipes from new favorite chefs, food creators engaging with their audiences in deeper ways than ever before, and brands collaborating with creators to reach their target audiences. We envision this ecosystem, where each participant supports the other, as the future of cooking. Pepper serves as the hub for this ecosystem, offering both community and utility features. 

To illustrate, I often think back to 2000 when every musician had their own website. You had to navigate through various websites to discover new music and albums, creating isolated experiences without real discoverability. There was only one channel for acquisition: through the artist themselves. Then, platforms like iTunes (now Apple Music), and Spotify emerged, providing a single platform to access all music while breaking down the barriers to discovery. We believe the world of cooking is still in the "2000 days before iTunes," and Pepper aims to revolutionize this space by providing a unified platform for cooking enthusiasts.

With Pepper, every chef deserves an audience. How does the platform support and promote home cooks, and what opportunities does it provide for aspiring chefs to showcase their talents?

Many cooking platforms cater to the 1%, such as New York Times Cooking or Yummly, offering a place to find recipes by professionals but little else. But what about me? None of these platforms truly support the 99%—regular home cooks like you and me—who take photos of their cooking only to have them lost in their photo gallery. Our goal is to support the home cook by providing tools to create your own cookbook, a feature not offered anywhere else. On Pepper, you can post any recipe you’ve made and even share your work of one of your favorite creator’s recipes. Soon, we'll even launch features that allow you to earn new chef titles as you add more recipes to your cookbook.

As Pepper continues to grow, what new features or developments can users expect to see that will enhance their cooking experience and community engagement?

As I mentioned earlier, I'm thrilled to share that we've just launched our premium subscription, Pepper+, this past week. This marks a significant step forward in helping you with the two fundamental aspects of cooking: owning your recipes and discovering recipes from others.

Looking ahead, we will be releasing updates to simplify the entire upload process. This will allow you to directly paste recipes from anywhere they may reside—whether in your notes, pictures, or elsewhere - into Pepper. Additionally, we will enable you to import recipes from across the internet while highlighting the original creator.

This summer, we are excited to introduce gamification tools. These tools will help you achieve different ranks and increase your score within the app. Looking ahead, we aim to assist creators in monetizing their followings in unprecedented ways.

Our goal is to build for the masses, ensuring every consumer can easily find and share their next recipe. Similarly, we want to help every creator engage with their following in new and exciting ways. We can’t wait to see how you all build your cookbooks on Pepper :)

If you would like to find out more about Pepper App, please visit https://www.peppertheapp.com/