Inside Burlap & Barrel's six-year recipe library
Burlap & Barrel's recipe library is six years old, 382 recipes deep, and carries 228 different bylines. It looks less like a brand recipe blog than a place its customers write in.
Burlap & Barrel is a Public Benefit Corporation selling single-origin spices bought directly from smallholder farmers, with every jar traceable to one farm or cooperative rather than a region or a broker. It has published recipes on Recipe Kit since 2020, one of the longest unbroken runs in our customer base.
How does Burlap & Barrel use Recipe Kit? Every recipe carries an author credit and a shelf of the exact spices the dish calls for, each one priced and add-to-cart ready on the recipe page itself. This teardown belongs to the Recipe Kit case study library, our running study of how food brands turn recipes into durable search traffic.
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.
We spoke with the Burlap & Barrel team about how the library gets made.
Who writes the recipes?
This was the question we most wanted answered. We had assumed the distinguishing pattern was celebrity chef collaborations, and the answer told us we had it wrong.
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.
Recipe Kit's data backs that up more literally than most brand claims survive. Across the library there are 228 distinct author credits. The most prolific contributor accounts for 29 recipes, which is under 8% of the library, so no single voice dominates it.
The names run the full range the team describes. In-house staff, independent recipe developers, and named professionals including Chef Reem Assil, Chef Marc Murphy, Chef Rick Bayless and Barkha Cardoz all appear. The Mole Tacos collaboration with Rick Bayless is real, but it is one collaboration among hundreds of contributions rather than the organising principle.
The recipes page is filterable by spice, meal and diet, which is the something-for-everyone principle built into the navigation (live, August 2026)
How does a dish get chosen?
The team pointed at the recipe we had asked about, Sticky Shallot Chicken Thighs, and the answer turned out to be an inventory decision as much as an editorial one.
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.
That is the most portable idea in this story. A spice brand knows months ahead when a harvest lands and when a SKU comes back into stock. Publishing the recipe into that window means the demand the recipe creates meets inventory that can actually serve it, instead of arriving during a stock-out.
The team was careful to qualify how firm that calendar really is.
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.
A delayed harvest costs them a publishing slot, so the plan moves to a recipe built on whatever did arrive. Buying direct from small farms is what makes the spices worth writing about, and it is the same thing that makes the dates hard to fix in advance. A library this deep is what lets them substitute without losing the week.
Every recipe leads with its author credit, here Danielle Schwab, who leads social at Burlap & Barrel (live, August 2026)
The recipe as a spice demonstration
The commercial mechanism is easy to see on the page. Above the ingredients, the Recipe Kit card 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 four jars in front of the reader, and its ingredient list links out to a fifth, the Ground Zanzibar Black Pepper.
The spice shelf sits above the ingredients, so the reader meets the products before the method (live, August 2026)
A shopper who arrives from a dish-name search is therefore one click from the jar, not from a general shop page. Over the last ninety days, more than 3.5% of Burlap & Barrel's recipe views produced a click through to one of those spice product pages.
Is any of this an SEO play?
We asked directly, because ranking for a dish name catches a cook at the exact moment they need the spice. The answer was more measured than the question assumed.
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.
What they described next is the more interesting answer, because it is a naming convention rather than a keyword exercise, and it happens to do both jobs at once.
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 is a customer-comprehension decision that produces a search-friendly title for free. 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, six years as of writing. Structured recipe schema is part of what lets a page be parsed as a recipe rather than a wall of text, and the shoppable recipe cards are what put the priced spice shelf on the page.
The run really is unbroken: 12 recipes in a part-year 2020, then 55, 81, 96, 79 and 93 across the full years, with 52 already published in 2026. There has been no year off and no abandoned relaunch.
On the commercial side, Recipe Kit's attribution only began counting for this store in September 2025, so what follows is roughly eleven months of data rather than a six-year total. In that window, recipes drove more than $12,000 in tracked sales across 621 separate orders. Burlap & Barrel reviewed that figure and cleared it for publication.
It is worth saying why we trust the number. It is spread thin and wide rather than propped up by a single large order: the biggest attributed order in the whole period is $256, under 2% of the total, and the monthly figures move in a narrow band. This is a long tail of ordinary baskets, which is exactly what a working recipe channel should look like.
What the recipes are really for
Asked how recipes fit into growing the business, the team took the answer somewhere other 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.
That is the through-line: on the recipe page, a traceable supply chain stops being a claim on a label and turns into dinner.
Lessons for spice brands
The moves here that travel to other spice and seasoning brands:
- Open the byline. Burlap & Barrel's library carries 228 different author credits, from staff to home cooks to named chefs. A recipe page with a real person on it reads as a contribution rather than a marketing asset, and the brand gets a library far larger than an in-house team could write.
- 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 arrive with it rather than against a stock-out.
- 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.
- 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. Serving the beginner and the confident cook from one library is what makes it a community rather than a showcase.
More spice stories from the case study library: how Oaktown Spice Shop converts recipe traffic, how Spiceology turns every blend into a shoppable recipe, and how La Boîte turns famous dishes into spice discovery. For the fuller playbook, see the recipe content marketing guide.
What comes next
The publishing calendar is set by the agricultural one, which is an unusual and rather durable place to get it from.
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.
Every one of those arrivals brings its own reason to publish, which is why the cadence has never needed a campaign to prop it up. After six years the library is still growing at roughly the rate it always has, and that steadiness is a large part of why it works.
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