CHENNAI: Twenty years, 70 countries, 6.8 million recipes and 100 million users. Japanese recipe sharing platform, Cookpad, claims to be Japan’s country’s largest. In 2014, the platform went global. Started with a mission to improve people’s lives by making everyday home cooking more fun, the site has recipes in Japanese, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Indonesian, Arabic and Vietnamese.
Cookpad forayed into India in December 2016 with the launch of the platform in English. With time, it penetrated through the Indian market by researching closely on the regular cooking habits of Indians and their keen interest in home cooking. It’s now available in five Indian languages — Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Hindi and Tamil.
Food has no language
The Tamil platform was launched early this month. “With over 22 officially recognised languages being spoken across cities, India is a culturally diverse market for us. Our users get an opportunity to share and learn diverse, local cuisines on a single platform. A testament to the performance of our language-based platforms in Cookpad is the increasing number of users opting for these vernacular mediums. The option of using the platform in Tamil will further benefit us by catering to more niche audiences and shall help us evolve as a brand,” said Shriniwas Mutnure, business head, India, Cookpad. A team of nine operates out of its headquarters in Bengaluru.
By launching a Tamil version of their platform, Cookpad is encouraging homemakers, budding chefs, culinary students and bloggers to break the language barrier and upload authentic regional recipes of Tamil Nadu online. Cookpad also announced that they will be launching Tamil in their mobile application in the upcoming weeks. Users can easily switch languages as per their choice with a single login and username.
Share, learn and eat
The platform helps you look up recipes published by users in your vicinity and follow users who publish the kind of recipes you would like to replicate in the confines of your home. You can sign up for free with your Facebook or Gmail or any existing email ID within seconds. Cookpad hosts weekly recipe contests, events, workshops and helps you interact with like-minded people in the cooking community and also learn by connecting you with industry experts and chefs.
“Roughly, 5,000 recipes have been uploaded so far on the Tamil platform. Each user uploads one recipe a week on average. People in the age group of 35-50 is active in writing and accessing recipes, according to our data. The platform is popular in Chennai and Coimbatore.
The urban reach has been a challenge. With vernacular languages, it will be easy to reach them. The Japan team is also working on video features to make recipe sharing more easy and interesting. We also host a meet-and-greet event for home chefs. A popular chef will be invited to give cooking demonstrations. We will be launching the Telugu platform next,” he said.
By the end of 2019, Cookpad intends on being present in seven major Indian languages in India. The goal is to enable users with the comfort of picking a language of their choice to navigate through their website.
For details, visit: cookpad.com/in-ta