This foodie founder built an AI sous chef

^{A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world.}

Good morning. If you’re a foodie or a millennial who ever dreamed of being a food blogger, this might just be the AI-era equivalent. 

This week’s founder is from my hometown, Adelaide, South Australia. Small world. 

Let’s dive in.

Subscribe | Past essays | Let’s collaborate | Insane Media

🤝 This edition is kindly brought to you by Bland AI

Introducing Norm—the first voice AI builder. Just tell Norm what kind of agent you want to build. For example, “Build me a full scheduling agent and integrate with my cal.com.” Norm generates the prompt, agent, conversational flows, and logic for you. Build on a safe branch and run agent-on-agent simulations before deploying to production.

Try Norm free at app.bland.ai

Sanjam Kohli moved to Australia from India when she was 17. Food was the only connection she had to her heritage, as she navigated culture shock. As an electrical engineer graduate, she spent five years as a radio systems engineer working on rooftops to mountaintops. But that hunger for home was never satiated. 

Kohli, missing her mum’s handwritten recipes and homecooked meals, would call her for notes. She’d send them to her daughter the only way she knew how: WhatsApp photos of notes, voice memos and scattered messages. 

Her engineer brain kicked into gear. 

She created Chefadora, an AI platform where anyone – a home cook, a migrant carrying their grandmother's recipes, a student cooking on a budget, a refugee preserving their culture through food – can share what they know and actually earn from it. 

“Because recipes aren't just instructions – they're memories, traditions, identities. Food is one of the most universal connectors we have. And no platform was fairly compensating the people creating it,” Kohli shared. 

Chefadora launched with no traditional marketing plan. It was built iteratively, starting with a single recipe. Kohli shared it with her network using her mom’s recipes. It took months to get their second author. 

The positioning is important. 

“We started building Chefadora before AI was a mainstream thing. Chefadora isn't an AI tool. It's a recipe platform that uses AI to make things easier for both creators and home cooks.” 

Kohli doesn’t believe in AI-generated recipes. AI is used to help creators and home cooks, not replace them. 

Chefadora recently won a $50,000 resource grant from the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, which will go toward developing Chefadora’s AI – a voice-enabled cooking co-pilot that talks to you while you cook, learns your family’s dietary needs, health goals, cultural preferences, and makes recommendations in line with local weather. 

Chefadora’s Recipe Genie lets creators publish a recipe in under a minute, removing every technical barrier. For cooks, the AI assistant allows for real-time guidance on recipes, no matter the origin. 

“AI is making the platform multilingual. We’re live in Hindi, doing final testing for Spanish and French, and building toward 80+ languages – turning cultural knowledge into a genuine income stream regardless of what language it was originally shared in,” Kohli said. 

Kohli wanted simple economics and took inspiration from YouTube’s creator model. 

“We've introduced a revenue-sharing model that didn't exist in the recipe space before. We give creators 55% of the ad revenue their recipes generate,” she said. 

There are over 500 creators, 12,000+ recipes across 100 cuisines, and 100,000 monthly active users globally. Recipes are free to access. Monetization happens through well-placed, non-intrusive ads, and future AI features that sit in a subscription. 

Chefadora’s moat isn’t AI, Kohli said. It’s the creators and the culturally diverse recipes they bring to the platform. 

Chefadora is all organic, founder-led and community driven. When a creator publishes on the platform, they bring their audience. That’s the flywheel Kohli is building on. 

“Going multilingual is probably our biggest growth lever. Every new language we launch unlocks an entirely new geography of both creators and home cooks,” she added. 

“Over the next two to three years, the focus is simple: be product-first. Build the best experience for creators and home cooks and let that do the work. We believe if the product is genuinely good, growth follows.” 

Kohli noted the AI-generated tamale content that suggested eating the corn husks, which should always be removed. Food, including the instructions in which it’s assembled, should never be artificial.

If one of these stories stuck with you, I’d love to hear which one.

Speak soon,
Amanda

P.S. If you want to get a founder feature about your own story, reply to this email. If you’d like to reach our newsletter audience (founders, creators, and marketers), click the button below.

If you’re new here, I’m over the moon you’ve joined us! To help me craft content that’s actually useful (and not just noise in your inbox), I’d love it if you took 1 minute to answer this quick survey below. Your insights help shape everything I write.

Dive into our other newsletters - where psychology meets the creator economy, e-commerce marketing, and Human resources.