Cookpad, the Japanese-owned online recipe sharing and cooking community, has added four senior staff to its global HQ, which opened in Bristol last year.
The four new arrivals, who include Mark Wheatley, co-founder of innovative Bristol music/audio platform Audiogum and former Mumsnet head of community Rebecca Mears, are the latest to join the firm as it continues its major recruitment drive.
It aims to attract the most talented developers and engineers to enable it to roll out its platform across the rest of the world from Bristol.
Cookpad currently operates in 22 languages across 60 countries worldwide. By expanding its team from 36 to at least 100 people by this spring it plans to increase that to more than 100 countries.
The Bristol operation is a subsidiary of hugely popular Japanese company Cookpad Inc, which allows visitors to upload and search through original, user-created recipes. The platform is used by an estimated eight out of 10 Japanese women.
The new arrivals also include are senior site reliability engineer Edward Robinson and search engineer David Gero and
Mark, pictured above right, who has joined the product team as head of product management – discovery, brings 15 years’ experience working in Bristol on multi-media digital products at Nokia, Mixradio and Microsoft. He went on to co-found Audiogum, a music and audio intelligence platform that uses next-generation recommendation and personalisation technology.
At Cookpad he will work with head of product Anthony Sullivan to develop rapidly moving and user-driven products which solve problems through technology.
Mark said: “It is a great opportunity to work alongside such a high calibre of talent in a company that exhorts ambition and has a vision to help people be healthier and improve family cohesion. Having such a noble cause is rare in tech start-ups. It’s this refreshing culture which cemented my desire to work for Cookpad.”
In her new role as lead community manager, Rebecca, pictured left, will build and develop communities of home cooking enthusiasts united by Cookpad in the 60 countries where it operates.
She brings seven years’ experience overseeing Mumsnet.com’s vast digital community and has an extensive freelance digital marketing, social media and business development portfolio.
Edward, pictured below right, who arrived from London-based retail tech experts Reevoo in November, will be responsible for ensuring Cookpad’s solutions continue to operate efficiently through rapid expansion while David will work to enhance its search capabilities. 
Cookpad moved into the Grade II listed Silversmiths office scheme on Broad Plain last summer, having chosen Bristol because of its vibrant tech community.
It says it wants to recruit staff who are not only top of their field in terms of their chosen development platform but who also buy into the Cookpad mission to “make the world a better place through cooking and bring people together through this shared passion”.
Anthony Sullivan said: “Cookpad offers a really exciting start-up environment for talented developers and engineers along with the opportunity to immerse themselves in Bristol’s thriving tech movement. To date we have seen an extraordinary standard of applications looking for chance to join us as a foundation member of this global enterprise.”
Cookpad is still actively recruiting for roles across engineering, product and design and operations.
The platform is already proving popular in Spain, Indonesia, Hungary and more with 90m unique users per month worldwide. The recipe sharing platform is just one small part of what Cookpad plans to offer long term. with the team testing machine learning for other products and services.
