Global online recipe sharing and cooking community Cookpad, which plans to reach 100 countries within the next three years from its new Bristol-based global HQ, has embarked on a major recruitment drive for developers and engineers.
As revealed by Bristol Business News in July, the tech company has moved into the Grade II listed Silversmiths office scheme on Broad Plain, near the city centre. 
It 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.
Cookpad now plans to grow and develop the platform and its offering across the rest of the world from Bristol.
It currently operates in 22 languages across 70 countries worldwide. By expanding its team from 25 to at least 100 by next spring it aims to increase that to more than 100 countries.
The Bristol team will be responsible for building the platform to a point where it is able to support 100,000 cooking enthusiasts, allowing them to make money out of their cooking, recipes and other food-related services by 2021.
Cookpad senior management want to recruit staff who are top of their field in terms of their chosen development platform. They also want people who buy into the Cookpad mission to make the world a better place through cooking and bring people together through this shared passion.
Cookpad’s platform, which has been operating for 20 years, has developed a huge following in its country of origin – 80% of Japanese women are said to use it. Now it plans to replicate this success in the rest of the world.
The platform is already proving popular in Spain, Indonesia, Hungary and more with 98m unique users a month worldwide. But the recipe-sharing platform is just one small part of what Cookpad plans to offer long term, with the team testing machine-learning solutions for other products and services.
The company has already recruited Anthony Sullivan as director of product. He has joined from Guardian News and Media, where he was a product director for more than three years.
He will work alongside chief technology officer Miles Woodroffe, who was as an engineer for Cookpad in Tokyo before working his way up to VP engineering international. Miles moved to the UK a year ago to help set up here and grow Cookpad globally.
He said: “We want to recruit people who will buy into our mission to create solutions that make a difference and build powerful tools for our members.
“Our vision is to share our ideas with the open-source community. We are passionate about pushing the boundaries of technology to create products people delight in using.
“At Cookpad we really believe we can create a better world by encouraging more people to indulge in home cooking. If you’re fun, creative and curious, you might be just the person we’re looking for.
“We always strive to achieve the best at Cookpad, and our team reflects this.”
Anthony added: “Cookpad offers a really exciting start-up environment for talented developers and engineers – and the chance for those who join us now to be a foundation member of this global enterprise.
“We need people with experience developing rapidly moving and user-driven products which solve problems and offer solutions through technology. Our developers must produce clean, maintainable, well-tested code.
“It will be technically challenging and highly rewarding work as part of a great team with a focus on pushing the product forward to be enjoyed by a global audience.”
