Recipe platforms aren't just for inspiration anymore-they're powerful engines for commerce. According to a 2024 Deloitte study, 67% of consumers say they’re likely to make a grocery purchase directly from a digital recipe. And with a recent PR Newswire survey, the intent to shop while discovering what to cook is stronger than ever. For food brands, bloggers, and content creators, this shift opens up massive opportunities to turn cooking intent into real revenue.
Recipes are inherently high-intent content. Users engage with them ready to take action. Whether it’s shopping for ingredients, finding kitchen tools, or exploring new meal ideas, recipes serve as a natural entry point into commerce.
A 2024 survey by Chicory found that over 70% of Millennial and Gen Z shoppers have been inspired by online recipes to try new ingredients or products they hadn't purchased before. Platforms that link discovery to purchase shorten the path from inspiration to transaction. The key is to integrate ecommerce seamlessly, without disrupting the cooking experience.
For over 12 years, SideChef has operated its own recipe platform across both app and web, testing and refining a variety of monetization models. Some didn’t work, others took experimentation to get right—but each brought valuable insights. Now, we’re sharing those learnings with you to help you unlock new monetization opportunities for your own recipe platform.
Whether you're a recipe creator with a personal site, an online retailer with a basic recipe hub tied to your product inventory, or a food or kitchen appliance brand aiming to build a branded recipe platform that drives engagement, trust, and direct revenue—there’s a path forward, and we’re here to help you find it.
Food bloggers know that their high-traffic recipe pages can generate income through affiliate links and by partnering with third-party ad managers like Mediavine or Raptive. You don’t need to run a full store to monetize. Many recipe platforms use affiliate networks like Amazon Associates, ShareASale, or Instacart Tastemakers to recommend tools, utensils, or ingredients. When placed naturally, these links generate revenue while keeping the experience seamless.
While this can bring in solid revenue once monthly active users (MAU) reach a certain threshold, it often comes at the cost of user experience—and gives site owners limited control over how their content is monetized. We often see recipe blogs crammed with 11 or more ads on a single page—many of them irrelevant. You might be shown a blockbuster movie or new furniture, but when you're trying to cook, those distractions break the flow and ruin the experience.
These traditional monetization methods like affiliate links and programmatic ads are no longer as effective for many sites. With increasing ad fatigue, rising privacy restrictions, and tighter competition for affiliate revenue, these once-reliable strategies often fall short—delivering lower returns and a fragmented user experience.
Today, creators and brands need more integrated, user-friendly monetization approaches that go beyond outdated models.
Furthermore, these methods also fall short for online retailers, CPG brands, and kitchen appliance brands — they redirect traffic, dilute brand messaging, and offer limited control over the customer journey. For brands looking to drive product discovery, engagement, and direct sales through recipe content, these approaches simply don’t deliver the impact needed in today’s commerce-driven digital landscape.
Are there other ways to monetize your recipe platform? Yes. Here are eight proven models that blend recipe content with commerce. We’ll deep-dive into each example and share more about SideChef’s own experiences with each of these monetization models.
The best ecommerce integrations feel seamless. Instead of cluttering your recipe pages with a dozen unrelated ads, show just one — perfectly aligned with the content. How? By matching ads directly to the ingredients in the recipe. Your RPM (Revenue Per Mille — ad earnings per 1,000 views) can stay steady or even improve, all while creating a much smoother user experience.
If a user’s reading a Cinnamon Raisin Banana Bread recipe, they’ll see an ad for Sun-Maid Raisins. A Chicken Masala recipe? Expect a Tyson Chicken ad. These ads appear right within the ingredient list.
Even better: users can click to add that item straight to their preferred retailer’s cart. They can also add the entire ingredient list with one tap — and the sponsored product is guaranteed to be included, with competitor brands excluded.
CPG brands love this level of hyper-targeted marketing. And you get to deliver a smoother, more intuitive cooking and shopping experience.
See how shoppable recipe ads can transform content into commerce, and how in-recipe ad campaigns let you reach shoppers at the right moment.
Partnering with food-focused brands — from CPGs to kitchen tools and tableware — unlocks new monetization opportunities while enhancing the user experience. Brands love sharing their story in meaningful, relevant contexts — like Torani sponsoring an article for The Budget Barista, or GOYA taking over the homepage to spotlight spiced-up winter drinks.
Beyond featuring sponsored ingredients within recipe pages, you can add a “In partnership with” tag alongside the brand’s logo. Recipe images can also showcase product placement—whether you shoot branded photos in your own studio or leverage SideChef’s AI-powered support team to enhance images by seamlessly integrating product packaging into existing photos.
Combining branded recipes with sponsored collections, engaging sponsored articles, and even homepage takeovers creates a powerful revenue stream for recipe sites. These opportunities require deeper brand partnerships, aligning your audience closely with the brand’s target market. While many campaigns are priced by impressions, SideChef’s technology enables you to provide brands with detailed engagement and conversion metrics they value most.
Some content creators take monetization further by embedding full ecommerce stores using platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce. TThis lets users discover, browse, and buy products without ever leaving the recipe site. However, for most recipe platforms, this approach is challenging. Large players like Food52 can run their own kitchenware and cookware stores — something out of reach for most smaller food sites.
Smaller food bloggers often rely on affiliate links, but these typically generate minimal revenue and demand constant curation and upkeep. The Kitchn came up with a smart solution of building an Essential Groceries Snacks article, curating their favorite products and including affiliate links for which they may earn a commission.
Another solution is embedding a Shoppable Recipe Button, allowing users to shop all the ingredients in a recipe. This is far more relevant than promoting cookware, since groceries are purchased weekly, not often. There are several providers — including SideChef — that offer easy integration of shoppable recipe buttons.
That said, no matter what you hear, this won’t be a revenue game-changer on its own. The real value comes when you use it to create a smooth shopping experience for your users and unlock the potential for shoppable recipe ads and meaningful brand sponsorships.
You can even combine this shoppability solution with branded product pages, embedding into your own site, like SideChef did for their partner Bacardi in the Mixlab Cocktails platform. All of the sponsored products are highlighted within a dedicated product page, with a direct-buy button, and recipe inspiration below, matching this product to the recipes within the platform.
Many recipe sites expand their revenue streams by selling digital products and downloads, offering value-packed content beyond free recipes. These can include printable meal planners, grocery lists, eBooks like “30-Minute Dinners” or “Vegan Holiday Recipes,” and even cooking guides or macro tracking sheets for specific diets. For example, Minimalist Baker sells digital cookbooks, while Pinch of Yum offers downloadable photography and blogging resources, and Budget Bytes sells Meal Plans for $5 a month. These products are easy to distribute, require no inventory, and cater to highly engaged audiences looking for premium, organized content. Tools like Gumroad and ConvertKit Commerce simplify the setup.
Have you heard of the Sprouted Kitchen Cooking Club? They offer weekly meal plans for $9.99/month — a strong example of a successful freemium subscription model in the food space, backed by a loyal, engaged community.
Many recipe apps have experimented with similar models: offering free access to basic content and features, while placing premium recipes, cooking classes, or advanced tools behind a paywall.
At SideChef, we’ve built and tested several freemium models over the years. Our own SideChef Premium unlocks 800+ exclusive recipes and guided cooking classes for just $4.99/month. We’ve also partnered with brands like Panasonic, who offer a complimentary subscription with select microwave purchases — a campaign that not only drove a significant boost in appliance sales, but also resulted in Premium users being up to 6x more engaged than regular users.
That said, building a freemium business is no easy feat. Converting users from free to paid is challenging — even popular apps like Headspace report only around a 3% conversion rate. Read more on how Headspace boost subscriptions. Still, with the right incentives, partnerships, and content strategy, freemium can become a powerful tool in your monetization mix.
Recipe sites can launch high-impact brand campaigns by creating dedicated campaign pages and integrating products directly into recipe and product pages. These campaigns combine storytelling, utility, and product placement in a way that feels natural to the user — and highly valuable to the brand.
A campaign page acts as a branded hub, showcasing curated recipes, product information, cooking tips, and links to purchase. These pages often feature banners, embedded videos, and call-to-action buttons, designed to immerse users in the brand’s world while delivering real cooking inspiration.
On product pages or individual recipe pages, the featured brand’s products can appear directly within the ingredient lists, often with visual cues (like a logo or packaging photo), and links to purchase or add to cart via retail partners. This integration creates a seamless path from inspiration to purchase.
A standout example of this in action is the Kitchn x Challenge Butter campaign. The Kitchn launched a seasonal baking campaign featuring Challenge Butter, complete with a beautifully branded campaign page. It included exclusive Challenge Butter recipes, product spotlights, and expert baking tips. The butter was prominently placed within the recipe ingredient lists and steps, reinforcing brand presence and driving both awareness and intent to buy.
This kind of campaign works best when there’s a strong audience-brand fit, and when metrics like impressions, engagement, clicks, and cart additions can be tracked and shared back with the brand — something tools like SideChef help enable.
Recipe sites often form strategic partnerships with kitchen tool, utensil, and cookware brands to create new revenue streams and add practical value for their audiences. These partnerships allow the site to recommend tools that align naturally with the cooking experience, while giving brands highly contextual, trusted exposure. Global Kitchenware Brand Hexclad partnered with Gordon Ramsay and FOX Entertainment for their new platform Bite of FOX.
For example, a recipe for sourdough bread might feature a sponsored Dutch oven from Le Creuset, or a pasta-making guide could highlight a branded rolling pin or pasta machine. These placements can live within the recipe content, in sidebars, or as part of a “shop the tools” section. Many sites also create branded content — such as tutorials or unboxing videos — that showcase the product in action.
A strong example is Serious Eats’ partnership with ThermoWorks, where recipes regularly recommend their meat thermometers, both on their platform and within their social content, driving both affiliate sales and brand trust. Similarly, Food52 integrates its own kitchenware line directly into recipes and editorial content, seamlessly blending inspiration and commerce.
To measure success, focus on these four metrics:
This helps you assess how well your content performs in driving monetization overall. It combines session engagement and transaction value into a single ROI-focused stat, ideal for comparing different types of recipes or campaigns.
A closely related and commonly used metric among food bloggers is RPM (Revenue Per Mille), which calculates earnings per 1,000 pageviews. RPM is especially helpful when you're monetizing through ads, as it reflects how efficiently your content generates revenue based on traffic volume. While Revenue Per Session shows user-level value, RPM gives you a broader sense of monetization performance across your site. Most food bloggers track both to get a clearer picture of what’s working — whether it’s a viral recipe driving ad revenue or a high-converting branded post boosting affiliate or shoppable earnings.
This metric shows how many users are actively engaging with your shoppable elements. A high add-to-cart rate signals strong purchase intent and confirms that your call-to-action and product placement are effectively driving behavior. It also serves as a valuable leading indicator for potential conversions.
To set realistic expectations, consider industry benchmarks: programmatic display ads typically see low click-through rates (CTR), often between 0.1% and 0.2%, while more premium, targeted ad placements can reach up to 0.6%. In contrast, when shoppable components are well-integrated, prominently displayed, and aligned with a high-intent audience, add-to-cart rates can consistently hit 1–2%, and in some cases even reach 6%. Engagement is even stronger in mobile apps, where outliers have seen up to 23% of users adding items to cart.
This metric measures the total value of items added to cart or purchased per user session — giving insight into how much users are buying, not just whether they’re clicking. It’s especially valuable when evaluating the effectiveness of bundled ingredient strategies or complementary product recommendations. The more users add in a single session, the higher your revenue potential — without needing to grow traffic.
For retailers, this metric is key to understanding transaction value driven by external content like recipe sites or shoppable ads. A high average basket size means users aren’t just window shopping — they’re buying across multiple categories, often inspired by a single recipe or collection.
It’s also critical for CPG brands running digital campaigns aimed at driving online conversions, especially in retail media or affiliate partnerships. If a sponsored ingredient is frequently added as part of a larger recipe-driven basket, it strengthens the brand’s case for ROI, increases product visibility at checkout, and justifies ad spend.
Ultimately, recipe sites that consistently drive higher basket sizes demonstrate their value not only as content destinations but as true commerce engines for both brands and retailers.
This is a key signal of long-term value, user satisfaction, and trust. It helps you understand whether your recipe-commerce experience is “sticky” — whether users are coming back not just for inspiration, but to shop and engage again. This could be loyalty to a certain type of recipe (e.g., weekly meal prep or seasonal baking) or recurring product purchases driven by ingredient familiarity and brand trust.
For retailers and CPG brands, repeat purchases are one of the strongest indicators of actual behavioral change. They show that your campaigns are not just generating one-off conversions, but building ongoing customer relationships. A user who buys Tyson Chicken for their first Chicken Marsala and returns to buy it again through a different recipe the next week has much higher lifetime value than a casual browser.
On the platform side, experiences that boost return visits — such as personalized recipe recommendations, saved grocery lists, cooking challenges, or loyalty rewards — directly improve retention and engagement. And since most monetization strategies in this space (whether from ads, affiliate revenue, or brand campaigns) are tied to monthly active users (MAU), increasing return users has a direct impact on overall revenue. Longer time on site, more frequent visits, and deeper session activity all help improve ad impressions, cart interactions, and conversions over time.
The best e-commerce experiences on recipe platforms feel natural, not forced. When you blend content and commerce smartly, you turn inspiration into action, and action into income. That’s the power of native e-commerce in action-when content and conversion work hand in hand.
Want to explore custom shoppable recipe features or branded product integrations? Reach out to SideChef to learn more about building recipe platforms that engage, scale and monetize.
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