How Pepper and Me turns product nicknames into recipes

Pepper & Me's Pepper-Crusted Seared Venison Loin recently ranked on page one of Google New Zealand for 'pepper crusted venison' (as of July 2026), ahead of HelloFresh, and its Chocolate Self Saucing Pudding recently ranked in the top 20 for a Kiwi classic searched about 9,900 times a month (as of July 2026). Both are recipes named the way this New Zealand family seasoning brand's community already talks about its blends, like nicknames rather than SKUs. That habit is the whole story in this case study library entry on Pepper & Me. Here is how a naming habit became a growth channel for a spice business built on a devoted following.

How does Pepper & Me use Recipe Kit? Pepper & Me publishes its recipe hub on Recipe Kit under its own blend names, with 409 recipes live and roughly thirteen new ones added most months over the past year. The brand has run its recipe hub this way since 2023, naming recipes the way its community already talks about the products.

The challenge

Pepper & Me is a family-run New Zealand brand making seasoning blends, pastes, and pantry staples, founded by Cherie Metcalfe in 2016 and grown into one of the country's most passionately followed food brands. Metcalfe trained as a professional chef, and started the business from a market stall after the birth of her daughter, Pepper, when going back to working nights in a commercial kitchen no longer fit the life she wanted. The brand carries her daughter's name for a reason. It began as a way to stay in food without leaving her family, not as a category play, and the first products she sold were seasonings built for busy new parents before the wider range took shape. A decade on, Pepper & Me has grown from that market stall into more than 80 products stocked in over 300 retail outlets across New Zealand, with Metcalfe now also the author of three cookbooks and a recognised voice in New Zealand food media.

The Pepper & Me homepage (live, July 2026)

The products have names with personality: French Kiss, Sgt. Pepper, Sunshine Salt. Customers do not refer to them by category, they refer to them by name. That is the commercial tension at the center of a chef-founder pantry brand with a devoted following: the affection is real, but a jar in the pantry only drives repeat purchase if a customer knows what to cook with it next. Cherie Metcalfe herself authors much of the recipe content, so the voice in the library is the same voice the community already knows and trusts, and the question the brand has had to answer is how to turn that trust into a habit of cooking, meal by meal, rather than a jar that gets used once and forgotten.

The strategy: name the recipe after the product the community loves

Most brands hide the product inside the recipe. The dish gets a generic name, and the branded ingredient appears halfway down the list. Pepper & Me does the reverse. The product name is right there in the recipe title, because that is how their customers actually talk about cooking.

Look at how one blend shows up across the library. There is a French Kiss Sausage Gnocchi, a French Kiss Chicken Schnitzel, and a Salmon Tray Bake with French Kiss Dip. One product, three different meals, each one titled around the blend rather than the protein. A customer who bought French Kiss and loves it does not have to guess what to make with it, there is a whole shelf of recipes named after the thing they already own.

The recipe that proves the model is the Pepper-Crusted Seared Venison Loin, seasoned with Sgt. Pepper and finished with Sunshine Salt. It is written for the hunting families in their audience, showing two blends against a specific cut of meat their customers actually cook, and it recently ranked on the first page of Google New Zealand for 'pepper crusted venison' (as of July 2026), ahead of HelloFresh. The product is not decoration. It is the reason the dish tastes the way it does, and the recipe is the reason a stranger searching for that dish finds the brand at all.

The recipe card on Pepper & Me's pepper-crusted seared venison loin recipe (live, July 2026)

How Recipe Kit supports the system

A naming strategy like this only works if the library can grow fast without becoming a maintenance burden, and if each recipe is structured well enough for search engines to read it. Pepper & Me publishes its recipe hub on Recipe Kit for that reason: structured recipe schema on every page, so Google can index a dish like the Chocolate Self Saucing Pudding as an actual recipe rather than a blog post, and a consistent recipe card format that keeps 409 pages, and counting, uniform without a designer touching each one. The brand's own blends are linked directly from the recipes that use them, so a customer reading about the Pepper-Crusted Seared Venison Loin can go straight from the method to the jars of Sgt. Pepper and Sunshine Salt that made it. That combination, structured for search and linked to product, is what lets a brand keep publishing roughly thirteen new recipes a month without the hub outgrowing what one small team can maintain.

Lessons for spice and seasoning brands

• Name recipes after the blend, not the protein. Pepper & Me titles dishes French Kiss Sausage Gnocchi and French Kiss Chicken Schnitzel instead of generic names, so a customer who already owns the jar can search its name and land on a shelf of meals built around it.
• Give a hero blend at least three different formats. French Kiss alone covers a pasta bake, a schnitzel, and a salmon tray bake dip in the library, enough range that one jar earns repeat use instead of sitting unopened in the pantry.
• Publish faster than one recipe a week. Pepper & Me has sustained roughly thirteen new recipes a month over the past year to reach 409 live, treating the hub as a standing production line rather than a launch-week extra.
• Let the founder's own voice write the library. Cherie Metcalfe authors much of Pepper & Me's recipe content herself, so the copy sounds like the chef the community already follows, not an anonymous content team.

For the broader thinking on recipes as an owned marketing channel, read our recipe content marketing playbook. And if you make spices or blends, our recipes for spice brands page covers the playbook in depth.

More seasoning and pantry stories from the case study library: how Mingle publishes eighteen recipes a month, sustained, how Bold Bean Co makes a jar of beans dinner, how iRASSHAi turned recipes into their primary SEO channel.

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