How iRASSHAi turned recipes into their primary SEO channel

This is the first in a short series of customer stories. We're starting with iRASSHAi, the Paris-based Japanese grocery brand whose quote sits on our homepage and whose recipe strategy other food brands keep asking about.

The brand

iRASSHAi is a Japanese grocery and food brand operating out of Paris. They sell more than 1,000 SKUs spanning miso, soy sauces, dashi, noodles, rice, tea, snacks, and alcohol, alongside several physical retail and restaurant locations (Biwan, Shokudo, Kissaba) clustered around 40 rue du Louvre. Their D2C storefront on Shopify is in French, with multilingual support. Their public review score sits at 4.66 stars across 6,756 verified reviews. It's a serious operation.

It's also the operation that left this on our homepage:

"Genuinely one of the key drivers behind our SEO performance."

I wanted to write up what they actually do, because the strategy is portable. Most of the moves below work for any food brand sitting on a real product catalog and a willingness to publish.

The strategy: recipes are built around the hero SKUs, not the season

The fastest way to spot whether a food brand has thought hard about recipe SEO or not is to look at the relationship between the recipes and the catalog. The dabbling brands publish whatever's seasonal or trending. The serious ones publish around the SKUs they're trying to move.

iRASSHAi is firmly in the second camp. Their "Cuisinez japonais avec iRASSHAi" section is a video recipe library where every recipe is built around an ingredient the store sells. Miso soup. Teriyaki sauce. Dengaku eggplant. Udon carbonara. Matcha cheesecake. Every one of those recipes is also a use case for a specific category iRASSHAi happens to sell extensively (miso, soy, matcha, noodles, dashi).

This is the move most food brands miss. A recipe that doesn't tie back to a SKU you sell is content that builds someone else's brand. A recipe that uses your hero SKU as the irreplaceable ingredient is a product demo dressed as a recipe.

The execution: shoppable from the recipe, language-native, video-first

Three things stand out about how iRASSHAi ships their recipe content.

Each recipe links directly to the ingredient product page. When a recipe calls for "sauce soja vieillie," that's not flat text. It's a link to the actual product in the catalog. This is the highest-ROI fix a food brand can make on existing recipe content, and it's the move that converts a recipe library from a vanity asset into a revenue channel.

The content is native French. Recipe SEO in English is brutal. You're competing with Allrecipes, NYT Cooking, BBC Good Food, and a hundred ad-funded recipe sites. Recipe SEO in French is meaningfully less crowded, especially for Japanese cuisine. iRASSHAi has built a moat in a language where the competition for "recette miso soupe" is dramatically thinner than the equivalent English query. Picking the right language to play in is an underrated SEO move for food brands.

Video as the canonical format. Recipe video earns engagement on social, but the video also lives on the recipe page itself. That's important for two reasons. One, it's a strong dwell-time signal for SEO. Two, it makes the recipe immediately reusable across Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest without rebuilding the asset. One production effort, four distribution surfaces.

The result: a measurable SEO channel

iRASSHAi has been on Recipe Kit since February 2023, which puts them at a little over three years and three months on the platform as of writing. Their published library sits at 294 live recipes, growing at a sustained cadence of roughly nine new recipes per month over the past year. That cadence is the move. They've never had a "Q4 recipe push." They've just published consistently for three straight years.

The traffic numbers from the same period:

• over 1.5 million lifetime recipe pageviews, across the full library.
• a 90-day volume in the top 1% of our merchant base, consistently above the 99th percentile of active Recipe Kit merchants for most of 2026.
• above 5% recipe-to-add-to-cart event ratio over the last 90 days. For context, this is the share of recipe-page sessions where a reader clicked "add to cart" on an ingredient that's also one of iRASSHAi's products. Single-digit-percent is healthy in this category. Five is well above average.

The single most-viewed recipe of the last 90 days is their classic fluffy Japanese soufflé pancakes, which alone earned tens of thousands of pageviews in that window. Their next four highest-ranking recipes are textbook hero-ingredient plays: sushi rice, gyoza, ajitsuke tamago (the marinated egg you put on ramen), and okonomiyaki. Every one of those recipes is a use case for ingredients sitting in their catalog.

The public signals around the brand are loud enough on their own. 6,756 verified reviews at 4.66 stars indicate a brand customers come back to. A recipe section large enough to merit its own navigation slot indicates a brand that decided recipes were worth resourcing, not a side experiment. A founder willing to leave the quote we anchor our own homepage with indicates someone who's seen the channel work.

If you want the deeper "why recipes work for food brands" thesis, we wrote it up in our recipe content marketing guide and the rented vs. owned land framework piece. iRASSHAi is what those guides look like in practice when a brand stops dabbling and commits.

What other food brands can take from this

A short list of the moves that travel well from iRASSHAi to any other DTC food brand:

• Build the recipe library around your hero SKU categories. Audit your catalog, identify the three to five categories where you're trying to win, and publish recipes that make your product the irreplaceable ingredient. This is the single most important strategic decision in recipe content.
• Every ingredient that's also a product you sell needs to be a one-tap add-to-cart. A recipe library without product links is a magazine. A recipe library with them is a storefront.
• Pick your search lane. Most English-speaking food brands play in the most competitive recipe search market in the world. If you have a credible reason to publish in another language (your audience, your cuisine, your retail footprint), the SEO math is meaningfully better.
• Make recipes a navigation item, not a buried blog category. If recipes are a serious channel, they get top-level nav. If they're hidden under "Blog > Recipes" three clicks deep, that's the brand telling you it's not really committed.
• Treat each recipe as a distribution master. Shoot it once, publish it on your store with proper schema, and clip it for social. The canonical version lives on a domain you own.

A note from us

If you sell food on Shopify and you want the recipe infrastructure iRASSHAi has been running on for three years, install Recipe Kit from the App Store. Free 14-day trial, no credit card. Or read the setup guide first if you want to see what the workflow looks like before you commit.

Patrick & the Recipe Kit team