How Ankerkraut turns pop culture into shoppable recipe campaigns
Ankerkraut's spice jars share shelf space with an Original Stormtrooper helmet and a Rick and Morty portal gun, which is not the merchandising you would expect from a company that started in a Hamburg garage in 2013. This piece is part of our case study library, and it is about how Ankerkraut, now one of Germany's best known seasoning brands, turns its recipe library into a landing pad for those collaborations, not just a search funnel.
How does Ankerkraut use Recipe Kit? Ankerkraut publishes recipes natively in German, organized by diet, cuisine, and cooking method, with 548 live recipes on Recipe Kit since 2021. The recipes we reviewed link the seasonings they call for straight to product pages, so limited edition and licensed spice blends stay shoppable long after the campaign that launched them has ended.
The challenge
Stefan and Anne Lemcke founded Ankerkraut in Hamburg in 2013, mixing the first spice blends themselves without flow agents, flavor enhancers, or artificial additives. The company grew fast from there: a 2016 appearance on Die Höhle der Löwen, the German equivalent of Shark Tank, Nestlé taking a majority stake in 2022, and in 2026 the Lemckes buying back Nestlé's majority stake, more than a decade after founding it. Today the catalog spans single spices, BBQ rubs like Magic Dust and Texas Chicken, baking spices, teas and mulled wine, gift sets, and oils, all under the same clean label promise.
A catalog this wide needs a reason for each blend to get used, and Ankerkraut leans harder into that than most competitors. The brand runs licensed collaborations most spice companies would never attempt: a Rick and Morty line, an Original Stormtrooper line, tie-ins with SpongeBob, Avatar and Garfield, plus collaborations with television chefs like Tim Raue and Ali Güngörmüs. The problem with a licensed spice blend is that on its own, it is just a jar with a cartoon on it. A campaign like that usually gets a two-week social burst and then goes quiet, while the blend sits on the shelf without a reason to reach for it again.
The system: campaigns that stay shoppable after launch
Ankerkraut's recipe library is where the license turns into something people actually engage with instead of a packaging exercise. The Rick and Morty tie-in is not only a set of jars, it is a set of recipes named Portal-Pickle-Pasta, Existence is Pain Tacos, and Get Schwifty Airfryer Chicken. The joke lives in the recipe, the recipe features the licensed blend, and the blend is one tap from the cart. A campaign that would otherwise fade in two weeks becomes an evergreen, searchable, shoppable page that keeps working long after the launch.
The Ankerkraut homepage (live, July 2026)
The shoppability goes down to the ingredient level, not just the headline SKU. Open Kroketten im Airfryer (croquettes in the air fryer) and every seasoning in the method carries a "Zum Produkt" link and an "In den Warenkorb" add-to-cart button, from Pommes Frites Salz to Kräuterbutter Gewürz to Pfeffer Symphonie. There is no hunting for the product afterward, the recipe does the merchandising. The same system runs the utility side of the library too, from a straight search like Hähnchenschenkel im Airfryer (chicken thighs in the air fryer) to a more adventurous Tahdig, the Persian crispy rice dish.
How Recipe Kit supports the system
Recipe Kit is the infrastructure underneath both tracks of the library. In the recipes we reviewed, each ingredient links directly to its product page, so a limited edition or licensed blend stays shoppable long after the campaign that launched it has ended. Recipes carry structured recipe schema, which is part of what helps a utility search like air fryer chicken thighs compete in organic search instead of getting buried in a blog archive. Ankerkraut publishes natively in German, and the library is organized three ways, by diet, cuisine, and method, so a straight utility search and a pop culture tie-in can live in the same catalog without either getting lost. Recipe Kit also surfaces a public star rating on every recipe, and Ankerkraut's is one of the most heavily rated libraries we host.
In their words
The Rick and Morty recipes (Portal-Pickle-Pasta, Get Schwifty Airfryer Chicken) are fully committed to the bit. Who writes those, and did the licensor sign off on the recipe names or only the packaging?
[Awaiting Ankerkraut’s answer. This section fills in once the team has reviewed the draft.]
How deliberately do you think about recipes as SEO? Ranking for a dish like harissa chicken catches someone right before they buy the spice, and I am curious if that is explicit strategy for you or just a happy side effect.
[Awaiting Ankerkraut’s answer. This section fills in once the team has reviewed the draft.]
How do recipes fit into the bigger picture of growing Ankerkraut?
[Awaiting Ankerkraut’s answer. This section fills in once the team has reviewed the draft.]
Lessons for spice and seasoning brands
The moves that travel from Ankerkraut to other spice brands on Shopify.
- Turn licensing deals into permanent recipe pages, not two-week posts. Ankerkraut's Rick and Morty tie-in lives on as recipes like Portal-Pickle-Pasta and Get Schwifty Airfryer Chicken, still searchable and shoppable long after the campaign calendar moved on.
- Run a utility track and a personality track from the same library. Straight searches like Hähnchenschenkel im Airfryer are the steady SEO target, while licensed and chef collaboration recipes carry the brand's personality. Ankerkraut runs both out of the same 548-recipe library.
- Put a product link and an add-to-cart button on every ingredient, not just the headline SKU. Kroketten im Airfryer links Pommes Frites Salz, Kräuterbutter Gewürz, and Pfeffer Symphonie individually, so the recipe does the merchandising instead of sending the reader off to search the shop.
- Organize the library at least three ways: diet, cuisine, and method. That structure is what lets a utility search and an adventurous one, like Tahdig, live in the same library without either getting buried.
- Publish natively in your customers' language, not just English. German recipe search is far less crowded than English, and Ankerkraut publishes recipes at a scale its English-first competitors cannot easily match.
If you want the deeper argument for why recipes work as owned marketing, we laid it out in our recipe content marketing guide and the rented versus owned land framework. Ankerkraut is what it looks like when a mainstream brand takes the idea seriously.
More spice stories from the case study library: how La Boîte turns famous dishes into spice discovery, how Spiceology turns every blend into a shoppable recipe, and inside Burlap and Barrel's six-year recipe library. If you run a spice brand yourself, our recipes for spice brands page covers the category.
Turn your catalog into a library of product demonstrations
Publish structured recipes on Shopify, connect each dish with the products used to make it, and show shoppers what your products can actually do.
