You may recall that some of the Missing Perspectives team attended a super fun evening hosted by Blackbird and the Clove team a while back – where we got to cook an amazing meal with the incredible Karima-Chloe Hazim…it was absolutely delicious, to no one’s surprise.
Since then, we’ve been using the beta version of the Clove app (for those not across it: a beta version is a pre-release version of an app that’s made available to a select group of users). No joke, Phoebe from our team has been banging on about the Baked Eggs recipe from the team at Cornersmith for the last couple of months – consider your PSA to go and try it stat.
We were SO thrilled to hear that Clove is now officially launching publicly – and this is in no way an ad or paid endorsement, it’s us spotlighting a tool that we genuinely love – led by an incredible female co-founder. What’s not to love?
In a nutshell, Clove is an online cooking platform that has just launched a mobile app – including an AI-powered meal planner, recipe import tools, and a creator recipe library with over 1,000 recipes. What’s even better is that the launch comes with a first-of-its kind partnership with iconic Australian publisher Hardie Grant Books – to licence recipes from best selling cookbooks, and through thus, create new digitals revenue streams for authors. Clove aims to reduce the mental load of cooking by bringing the entire process into one simple platform – and helps home cooks (including amateurs like us) centralise their favourite recipes. It converts recipes into a really easy-to-cook format.
Clove co-founder Anna Guerrero has launched Clove after a stellar stint at tech unicorn Canva. She says leaving Canva was a difficult decision.
“While I loved tech, I left to pursue my love of cooking and food, which at the time was just a hobby. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do at the time so I spent some time learning – attending culinary school and working as a pasta chef in a Michelin restaurant,” Anna tells Missing Perspectives.
“It was hard work, but it allowed me to spend time learning from people who were deeply passionate about sharing their love of food and cooking with others. I realised I wanted to do that same, but given my background at Canva, had the itch to do it at a larger scale.”
After a long shift working at a restaurant – cooking for a small number of tables – she knew that things had to change when it came to knowledge management in cooking.
“I had been sketching the idea for Clove after work, and I realised that if I was going to help more people find joy in cooking, I would need to find a way to do so at a larger scale,” she says. “I began diving more deeply into the reasons that kept people out of the kitchen – running interviews and talking to friends back home – and it became clear that for something that so many of us need to do, so many people still felt intimated and frustrated by the process of everyday cooking. Cooking on a weekend was a luxury, getting dinner on the table during the week was not.”
A key component of Clove is spotlighting incredible cooks – including an amazing group of female creators and cooks (including Cornersmith’s Alex Elliott-Howery, and Sunday Kitchen’s Karima Hazim) in what is a traditionally male dominated industry.
“The vision for Clove is to become a platform that empowers everyone who’s passionate about sharing their knowledge and love for cooking. That means becoming truly diverse – across gender, ethnicity, ages etc. In my experience so far, there’s no shortage of women doing incredible things in the cooking space – it’s an honour for Clove to play a role in spotlighting them.
The public version of Clove, and the announcement of Clove’s partnership with publishing house Hardie Grant, is being launched in the midst of a broader conversation around recipe creator rights and intellectual property. So, what systems need to exist to better support food creators?
“Cookbooks remain one of the most resilient publishing categories of all time – people everywhere still love buying them. And what we loved about working with Hardie Grant was our mutual belief that there shouldn’t be an expiry on incredible cooking knowledge,” Anna says. “But the print model has natural limitations – books go out of print, and licensing and distribution has all sorts of complexities across countries. When you’re trying to decide what to have for dinner, it’s understandable that you might not have time to flick through hundreds of pages of recipes in cookbooks.
“Our goal is to connect recipes from best selling authors more easily with home cooks who have the practical task of deciding what to have for dinner. Bringing this knowledge online is a no-brainer, and over time we are optimistic that we can create further digital revenue streams for creators and publishers to earn fairly from their hard work.”
Anna and the Clove team have a BIG vision for Clove: “If we can change how we eat as a global community, we can also meaningfully change how cooking impacts our food systems, our health and our connection to our communities”. And it’s hard to disagree.
Top photo source: Clove. Pictured: Anna and Clove co-founder Sam
