aki sano

In earlier times, it was the dinner table where people had most of their interactions and the family members connected with each other. Slowly, the time changed, and people were more into buying readymade food and eat it alone. We can call it a lack of time that people no more find time to sit and eat food with their family. This way, people also started forgetting the recipes of traditional food and preferred not to cook. But there is a man named Aki Sano, the founder of Cookpad, who understands the value of self-cooked food. It not only helps people save a lot of money but also keeps people in touch with their traditions.

Aki Sano founded Cookpad about 22 years ago in Japan. It is not that he hit the idea, and the startup was an instant success. There were a number of incidents that took place before Cookpad could really be one of the largest online recipe-sharing platforms in the world.

About the Founder

Aki Sano is a Japanese entrepreneur, who was born on 1 May 1973 in Tokyo, Japan and studied at Keio University, Tokyo. He had always been interested in technology as well as alternative energy. When he was in high school, he built solar-powered cars. Following his passion, he took alternative energy as a subject at the university. He then went to attend a one year Solar Summer Camp, too. Later, during his graduation, he also made it to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) conference in New York. Though he found the conference quite boring and dull, he met an interesting fellow from West Indies named Abdu.

Abdu had got a degree from the US but returned to his homeland, where he grew his own vegetables and did farming. Sano found it quite interesting, and it had a great impact on him. Back to Japan, while buying vegetables from a supermarket, Sano realised that he was about to buy imported vegetables when he could get fresh ones from across the road from the local farmers. This incident and meeting with Abdu got him to sell vegetables from the farmers to the students at the university.

He managed to join in many farmers who would deliver vegetables to the students at the university who had placed the orders, and if there were any extra veggies, they would sell those to people passing by. This way, it became a huge business, and Sano had to build a website for the same. This, eventually, became his first startup. He managed the business for two years, and after two years, it was the time to graduate. His friends had started cracking the interviews with companies and were already placed. But Sano was still thinking of what he should do.

Founding Cookpad

With his experience with the vegetable selling business as well as his interest in corporate business, he decided to start his company and named it COIN. But despite he launched the company, he had no idea what he would be producing or selling. He ended up with three ideas, expanding his vegetable selling business, build products that endorse alternative energy or do something around housing. But eventually, he discarded all those ideas and came with Cookpad.

Initially, Cookpad was known as Kitchen@Coin, which was a side by side business that he was running along with a full-time job. The idea behind the startup was that people were avoiding cooking food and ultimately, buying the vegetables, just because they did not have the right recipes. With Cookpad, he wanted people to find the right recipe to cook the right food. It was a subscription-based service, where people could put their food recipes. The subscription fee for the platform was $5 per month. Sano set the target of 50,000 people joining the platform within two months, but only 100 people joined the platform and that too, in three months.

This discouraged Sano badly, and he asked his subscribers how he could return the money as he had decided to close the platform. But for his surprise, the subscribers were ready to pay more to keep the service going. This way, he made the service free for his subscribers and changed the name Kitechen@Coin to Cookpad in June 1999.

The Success

By March 2002, the company started advertising the business across the country. In September 2004, Cookpad launched premium service for the users. After two years, the company launched its first mobile service naming it as MOBAREPI. It then announced a premium service for the MOBAREPI users as well, in November 2008. Cookpad hosted its IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on July 2009. This was the time when the company really saw the success and had earned revenues increased by 80 per cent.

Cookpad was named in the list of the TSE Mothers in July 2009. By 2010, the company started expanding across borders and opened its first office in California, USA, followed by opening one in Singapore in 2011. Today, the company has its offices in countries, including the UK, Spain, Indonesia, Lebanon, Brazil, India, Taiwan, Hungary, Greece, Russia, etc. The company has established its international headquarters in Bristol, UK.

Today, Cookpad has got around 5 million registered recipes on it and hosts 40 million monthly unique users globally. Sano stepped down from the post of the CEO of Cookpad, and in 2014, he owned a 44% stake in the company, which valued more than $1 billion. In 2016, Sano ranked at #42 in the Forbes Japan’s 50 Richest 2016 list.