Inside Burlap & Barrel's six-year recipe library

Burlap & Barrel's recipes drew more than 200,000 views since July 2025. More than 40% of the spice sales those recipes drive come from recipes that are over a year old.

Burlap & Barrel is a Public Benefit Corporation selling single-origin spices bought directly from smallholder farmers, with every jar traceable to one specific farm or cooperative. It has published recipes on Recipe Kit since 2020.

How does Burlap & Barrel use Recipe Kit? Every recipe carries a shelf of the exact spices the dish calls for, each one priced and add-to-cart ready on the recipe page itself.

The challenge

Burlap & Barrel was co-founded by Ethan Frisch and Ori Zohar to replace the opaque commodity spice trade with a transparent one. The stated mission is to end exploitation in the spice trade and put real value back in the hands of the growers, and the proof point is traceability: every jar ties back to a specific farm.

That story only converts if a shopper believes the spice is different. When the whole pitch is that your cinnamon or cumin tastes nothing like the supermarket version, you have to prove that on a plate rather than assert it on a label.

The hero SKUs are single-origin spices: Royal Cinnamon, Wild Mountain Cumin, Zanzibar Black Peppercorns and Smoked Pimentón. Each is positioned as a chef-tier upgrade to a pantry staple, and each one needs a reason to be opened.

Everybody is welcome at our table

Our Recipes Page is built around the idea of community. It's a space where people who share a passion for our spices can gather and inspire each other through their love of cooking. Part of what makes our Recipes Page so special is the mix of voices behind the recipes—they are authored by home cooks, professional chefs, recipe developers, friends, and the Burlap & Barrel team.

It's important to us to have something to offer for everyone, whether that's based around a particular spice, meal, diet, time constraint, or skill level. Whether you're a professional chef or just beginning to cook, everybody is welcome at our table.

That range shows up in sales. Since September 2025, 235 different recipes have sold at least one spice, across 188 different products. No single recipe carries the library.

The recipes page is filterable by spice, meal and diet, so every cook can find a way in

How does a dish get chosen?

Take Sticky Shallot Chicken Thighs, the library's top-earning recipe.

The Sticky Shallot Chicken Thighs recipe was written by our talented teammate Danielle, who leads our social media team. The timing coincided with a big restock of our umami, crispy, air-dried Purple Shallot Slices, which are featured in the dish.

Oftentimes our recipes are built around spice restocks or new launches, but can also be shaped by food trends, viral recipes, and personal preferences. And our growing catalog of recipes is grounded by something we proudly stand behind—our fresh and flavorful single origin spices.

This is the idea worth copying. Publish the recipe when the jars arrive, and the demand it creates has stock to meet it.

It worked here. Sticky Shallot drew about 2,000 views in its launch month, April 2026, and most of its sales came that month. Purple Shallot Powder earned the most of any spice it sold.

Harvests do not always keep to the plan.

While we aim for certainty with every new launch or restock timeline, harvests can be unpredictable. Our estimates are usually accurate, but if we run into a delay, we develop alternative plans and recipes to match.

Because we prioritize equitable sourcing and direct supply chains with small farms and cooperatives, we may temporarily run out of stock due to smaller-than-predicted harvests or unexpectedly high customer demand from time to time. We plan as carefully as possible while staying realistic and flexible.

Sticky Shallot Chicken Thighs, the library's top-earning recipe, published to match a Purple Shallot restock

The recipe as a spice demonstration

Above the ingredients, every recipe carries a shelf headed Get the spices for this recipe, with each spice priced and ready to add to the cart. The Sticky Shallot recipe alone puts five jars on that shelf, and the fifth is the Ground Zanzibar Black Pepper.

The spice shelf sits above the ingredients, so the reader meets the products before the method

A cook who finds the recipe on Google is one click from the jar. In the last six months, about 4% of recipe views ended in a click through to a spice.

Traffic runs the other way too. About 8,200 recipe views in the same period started on a Burlap & Barrel product page. A shopper looking at a jar goes looking for something to cook with it, and the recipe answers that question before they decide.

Customer experience first

The team keeps SEO in mind during recipe creation, but our primary focus will always remain on customer experience. Our goal is to provide user-friendly, inspiring, and delicious recipes that showcase our exceptional spices that are sourced directly from small farms and cooperatives around the world. We think our customers appreciate and respond to that.

Their naming habit helps with search anyway.

We often name recipes after the spices featured in the dish, which helps the customer connect the dish with the flavors. Photos of the finished dishes, sometimes alongside the actual spice jar, can also help connect and inspire. We've recently also been paying closer attention to viral food trends and content. We want to keep our community excited to cook.

Naming a dish after the spice in it tells the cook what they will taste, and it gives the page a title search engines understand. Honey-Glazed Berbere Wings and Hatch Green Chili Chicken and Rice both put the product in the headline, so the page ranks for the spice and the dish together.

How Recipe Kit supports the system

Burlap & Barrel has run its library on Recipe Kit since July 2020. Structured recipe schema helps a search engine read the page as a recipe instead of a wall of text, and the shoppable recipe cards put the priced spice shelf on the page.

They have published every year since, between 55 and 96 recipes in each full year.

Since September 2025, recipes have driven more than $14,500 in sales across nearly 700 orders.

Old recipes do much of that work. More than 40% of recipe sales came from recipes that were over a year old on the day of the sale, and about 11% came from recipes more than three years old. Ras El Hanout and Caribbean Jerk Dry Rub, both published in 2022, still sold spice in 2026.

What the recipes are really for

For the team, recipes are about more than traffic.

As we continue to grow, we hope our recipes will continue to engage our community and also help us share the stories behind the spices we source from around the world. This platform gives us an opportunity to share more than delicious food ideas—it also allows us to better connect our customers with the origin of their spices, the flavor these spices can bring to their tables, and the partner farmers behind them who make this possible.

Three things get connected there, and only one of them is the dish: the origin of the spice, the flavour it brings, and the farmer who grew it. A product page can carry the first two. The recipe is where all three land at once, in the moment someone is actually cooking.

We are proud that every spice we sell can be traced back to a single farm or cooperative, and not just a vague region or supply chain. Our recipes represent more than just a meal—they tell a story and create a connection.

On the recipe page, a traceable supply chain stops being a claim on a label and turns into dinner.

Lessons for other CPG companies

What other CPG brands can take from this:

• Treat old recipes as stock, not archive. More than 40% of Burlap & Barrel's recipe sales come from recipes over a year old. Keep older recipes linked to products you still sell, and they keep selling.
• Publish into your restock calendar. The hero recipe here was timed to a big restock of Purple Shallot Slices. You know when inventory lands, so schedule the demand to land when the jars do.
• Name the dish after the spice. Honey-Glazed Berbere Wings tells a shopper what flavour they are getting and tells a search engine what the page is about. One decision does both jobs without any keyword stuffing.
• Link the jar back to the dish. About 8,200 recipe views in six months started on a product page. Shoppers use recipes to decide, so make them easy to find from the product.
• Put the products above the method. The spice shelf sits before the ingredients, priced and add-to-cart ready, so the reader meets the jars while intent is highest.
• Serve every skill level. Filters for spice, meal and diet exist because the library spans a ten-minute granola and a slow-built mole. A library that serves both the beginner and the confident cook earns the word community.

For the fuller playbook, see the recipe content marketing guide.

What comes next

Their publishing calendar follows the harvest.

We are consistently restocking our spices during harvest seasons, all while adding brand-new spices and collaborations to our lineup. More recipes can create more opportunities for inspiration, which can ultimately lead to stronger customer engagement and sales.

Each harvest brings a new reason to publish. Six years in, the library still grows every year.