2008Rebuilt on Ruby on Rails; feature-phone service
2009IPO on the TSE Mothers market
In October 1997 Akimitsu Sano, a graduate of Keio University’s Shonan Fujisawa Campus, set up the limited company Coin in Fujisawa, Kanagawa, doing contract software development. In March 1998 he launched a service of his own — kitchen@coin, renamed Cookpad in January 1999 — that let anyone, from a home PC, post and search recipes. Sano wrote the whole thing himself. The idea moved the source of a recipe off the cookbook and the food company and onto the people who actually cooked, and made Cookpad one of the pioneers of user-generated content on the Japanese internet.
Monetisation came in deliberate stages: advertising in March 2002, then a paid tier, Cookpad Premium, in September 2004 — the same month the limited company Coin was converted into Cookpad Co., Ltd. As late as April 2005 the firm had just four full-time employees; the point was that a tiny editorial team plus content written by users made for a highly capital-efficient business. The more recipes users posted, the sharper the search became, which drew still more posts — a loop that let the archive compound to millions of recipes with almost no added headcount.
In 2008 Cookpad rebuilt its entire system on Ruby on Rails, then one of the largest Rails sites in the world, and began offering the service on Japan’s feature phones through the mobile carriers, where carrier billing turned casual users into paying members. Riding that, Cookpad listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers market in July 2009. Because the sheer volume of user posts translated directly into search accuracy and SEO advantage, latecomers could not catch up, and Cookpad held a near-monopoly on recipe search.
2010The Akita era: diversify, then a battle for control
Revenue (¥ bn, bars) · net margin (%, line)
Source: securities reports
FY2010 · unconsolidated
Revenue$25M
Net income$6M
Net margin22.7%
→
FY2016 · consolidated
Revenue$154M
Net income$8M
Net margin5.4%
2012Sano steps down; Yoshiteru Akita becomes president
2013Acquires Coach United (~$10.2M (¥1bn))
2014Buys overseas recipe services (All the Cooks, Itis Siglo 21)
2015Buys Arabic-language Netsilia; revenue tops $82.6M (¥10bn); Minna no Wedding consolidated
2016Sano ousts Akita as president; Hifumi sells out
2016Minna no Wedding tie-up unwound; CTO Yuichi Tateno departs
In May 2012 Sano stepped down as president and Yoshiteru Akita — former head of the price-comparison site Kakaku.com — took the top job, while Sano stayed on as the largest shareholder and a director. Reading Cookpad’s dependence on a single domestic business as a weakness, Akita pushed diversification: he bought the lesson-booking service Coach United for about $10.2M (¥1bn) in 2013, then acquired overseas recipe services in quick succession — All the Cooks in North America ($5M (¥530m)) and Spain’s Itis Siglo 21 ($10.5M (¥1bn)) in late 2013/early 2014, and the Arabic-language Netsilia ($13.2M (¥2bn)) in January 2015 — and in 2015 folded in the wedding-information site Minna no Wedding.
On the top line it worked: revenue passed $82.6M (¥10bn) in the year to December 2015, and Cookpad booked a seventh straight year of rising sales in 2016, becoming one of the market’s favourite growth stocks. But most of the acquisitions failed to earn, and the strategic split ran straight into ownership. Sano, holding about 43.6% of the votes, favoured concentrating on recipes; Akita wanted a broad platform for daily life.
In March 2016 that dispute broke into the open, and the board removed Akita as president — a founder ousting a sitting chief executive. The market had already reacted when the dispute first surfaced in January: the fund Hifumi, run by Hideto Fujino, sold its entire stake the moment the dispute came to light. By December the tie-up with Minna no Wedding was unwound and the CTO, Yuichi Tateno, left, draining an engineering organisation once famous among Ruby developers. A listed company in which one founder held more than 43% of the votes had exposed a structural weakness in its governance: the checks a shareholders’ meeting is meant to provide simply did not bite.
2018Profit falls ~$27.2M (¥3bn) as video recipes rise
2019First net loss since listing; users down ~10 million from 2016
2021Swings to an operating loss
2022Second straight operating loss
202340 voluntary redundancies; third straight loss; headcount 409 → 147; Sano returns as president
2025Revenue $35.4M (¥5bn), about half the peak
From 2016 the way people consumed recipes shifted from “search and read” to “watch on video.” A newcomer, Kurashiru, offered chef-supervised short videos built for the smartphone, and cooking clips on YouTube took hold; the advantage of text-based UGC as a format simply drained away. In the year to December 2018 Cookpad’s profit fell by about $27.2M (¥3bn) as paid membership began to shrink, and in 2019 it posted its first net loss since listing. Annual users were down roughly ten million from the 2016 peak.
The millions of text recipes Cookpad had accumulated over some twenty years were not much of a wall against a different format. Operating losses of about $23.7M (¥3bn) in 2021 and $19.2M (¥3bn) in 2023 made three straight loss years; a voluntary-redundancy round of forty people announced in February 2023 was not enough, and headcount fell from 409 to 147 in a single year. In October 2023 Rinpei Iwata — president since Akita’s 2016 ouster — stepped down, and Akimitsu Sano returned to the presidency after eleven years.
Sano has been unwinding what the Akita era built out, selling off the overseas recipe companies, Minna no Wedding and Coach United and pulling resources back to the core recipe business — the retrenchment run not by the man who led the acquisitions but by the founder who fought his strategy and won back control. Revenue for the year to December 2025 was just $35.4M (¥5bn), about half the peak, and the company is still feeling for a way to rebuild.
The turning points, read in full: what was at stake, what was chosen and what the revenue did around it. The complete sourced record of each — background, options weighed, outcome — is in the Japanese edition, linked under every decision.
Key decision · 1998
Founding Cookpad: staging the revenue on a user-posted recipe service (1998)
Gather for free, recover by staying on food: the user-posted model
The heart of Cookpad’s founding was to open recipes for free — widening the base of people posting and searching — and then to layer monetisation on top in stages: advertising in 2002, paid membership in 2004. Having, at the very start of the business, chosen a $4 (¥500)-a-month charge only to withdraw it after barely two months, Sano switched the order — build value and scale first, recover later — and that reordering set the course of everything that followed. A business carrying losses in the year to April 2005 had, by the year to April 2008, grown into one generating more than $5.8M (¥600m) in sales and around $2.9M (¥300m) in ordinary profit — precisely because a base widened for free supported several revenue streams, advertising and paid membership, at once.
What stands out is that this revenue base was built while staying specialised in a single field — cooking. Against the temptation to broaden the sources of revenue, Sano instead preached “stop doing Good,” narrowing the aim and concentrating resources on the single point of making cooking a pleasure. To what looked like an either/or — paid or free, expand or specialise — the founding-period judgement offered an answer: layer paid membership on top of a base widened for free, and let several revenue streams coexist while staying specialised in cooking. The discipline of continually asking what the value is as seen by the user became the template for the paid-membership model that would carry on after listing, and set the skeleton of a business that supports the everyday domain of cooking with information technology.
Diversification and overseas recipe deals under Yoshiteru Akita (2012)
What $85M (¥9bn) of diversification left behind
Akita’s diversification was one answer to the question of where a high-margin, single-business company should look for its next growth. With a stable domestic recipe earner in hand, he read concentration on that one field as a “one-legged batting stance” and, over about two years, put roughly $85M (¥9bn) into lessons, overseas recipes, weddings and job listings to broaden the base. Revenue grew from $49M (¥4bn) to $154.8M (¥17bn) — in scale, exactly as intended. But most of the overseas recipe and lesson businesses he bought never turned into earnings, and impairments and disposals followed. That scale expanded while profit did not suggests the speed and size of the diversification may have run ahead of any deal-by-deal test of whether it would pay.
This diversification was not merely a matter of business strategy; it also became the tinder in a fight over who controlled the company. The founder, Sano, who valued concentration on cooking recipes, and Akita, who was pushing expansion across daily life as a whole, differed at the root over where resources should go. Under a capital structure in which Sano remained in the background as the largest shareholder with about 44% of the votes, that difference in direction deepened as the businesses grew. The record — diversification lifting revenue while profit failed to follow and impairments continued — became, for the side that wanted focus, material for questioning the expansion. Akita’s investment toward a platform for daily life became the direct point of contention in the fight over management control that surfaced in 2016.
The founder retakes control: ousting president Akita (2016)
A founder’s share control puts a listed company’s governance on trial
The heart of this affair lay in the structure of share control: a single founder holding 43.581% of the votes in a listed company. Cookpad was set up as a company with nominating and other committees — a vessel for supervising management through deliberation centred on outside directors. And indeed a special committee of five outside directors recommended that the incumbent management stay on, and an audit committee member described the founder’s exercise of his voting rights as seizing “an unexpected opportunity,” going so far as to raise the risk of a breach of fiduciary duty. Yet none of these judgements from the governance machinery had the power to overturn a majority vote at the shareholders’ meeting. The brakes the system had prepared could not fully work in the face of an overwhelming shareholding ratio.
What remained was the question of how few options a minority shareholder has. That Hideto Fujino sold his entire holding the moment the dispute came to light was nothing other than a judgement that minority shareholders could not stand against the founder’s control. Management control returned to the founder and the return to the core business advanced — but in the process the share price sank by half in a year, and the costs left behind included the formation of a labour union and a run of departures among senior staff. How to protect the independence of the board and the special committee, and the interests of minority shareholders, under a dominant founding shareholder — Cookpad’s control affair is remembered as a case that thrust the fundamental problem of listed-company governance forward in vivid form.
Decline as video recipes rise, and the turn to a smaller equilibrium (2019)
A late start on video, and the smaller equilibrium it forced
The heart of this decision was to stop chasing scale and, by trimming costs to fit the core cooking business, halt a chain of losses. As the pioneer of posted-recipe services, Cookpad had held an overwhelming domestic user base, but it was late to adapt to the new format of short smartphone video, and free video took users’ time and attention away. The archive of posted recipes built over many years became hard to convert into competitive strength once the format shifted. Paid membership thinned after peaking in 2018, and the company sank from a net loss in 2019 into three straight years of operating losses from 2021. Voluntary redundancies and the closure of six businesses cut headcount by more than half, and it was this smaller equilibrium — matching costs to revenue — that set the precondition for returning to profit.
That said, the turn to profit did not mean the business grew again. By the time it returned to the black in 2024, revenue had shrunk to $38.3M (¥6bn), and the decline in paid members from the end of 2023 to the end of 2024 continued. Meanwhile dely, which had moved early on video, listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Growth market in December 2024 at a market capitalisation of about $316.8M (¥48bn). A latecomer only a few years old had grown large enough to surpass the first mover, Cookpad, in scale. By early 2026 Kurashiru’s revenue was said to top three times Cookpad’s, reversing the scale positions in the recipe market. A late start on a new technological current flipped the competitive standing, and the smaller equilibrium worked not as a road to recovering lost scale but as a choice to defend the core that remained.
This is a condensed English edition. The full, source-by-source history — with the detailed narrative, financial tables, shareholders and executives — is maintained in Japanese: 日本語版（詳細）— Cookpad full history in Japanese →
Cookpad Inc. — 有価証券報告書 (annual securities reports) and earnings materials (決算説明資料).