Company history

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 month a new operating company, Cookpad Co., Ltd., was incorporated. 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.

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 in January 2014 acquired overseas recipe services in quick succession — All the Cooks in North America ($5M (¥530m)), Spain’s Itis Siglo 21 ($10.5M (¥1bn)) and the Arabic-language Netsilia ($15.1M (¥2bn)) — 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, which shocked the market: the fund Hifumi, run by Hideto Fujino, sold its entire stake. 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.

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 2022 voluntary-redundancy round of forty people was not enough, and headcount fell from 409 to 147 in a single year. In October 2023 Rinpei Iwata — the president the Akita era had installed — 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.