A friend gifted me a few hellofresh boxes once and I quite liked the recipes. But I don’t care about subscription services to get overpriced groceries delivered if the supermarket is a 5 minutes walk away.
Is there any collection on the recipes online? At least in Germany, recipes aren’t even copyrighted, so it wouldn’t even be illegal to distribute them here (AFAIK, IANAL).
Fun fact about recipes: they are not copyrightable.
So you can’t “pirate” them unless they put them behind a paywall, and even then you can download and reshare them.
I absolutely hate that Basics with Babish put his recipes behind a paywall.
Babish did? Jesus. Well my opinion of him has gone down a bit.
Is it really any different than, say, a cookbook? I mean, Babish has to pay his bills and most of his content is still free videos which show you how to cook things including proportions and measurements for the ingredients.
Andrew Rea is a special kind of asshole (gotta love how he uses his own, probably legit, stories of struggles with mental health to sell fucking Better Help of all things).
But recipes and paywalls have always been a mess. Cookbooks were, and still are, a thing. And the time and cost it takes to develop a recipe is REALLY high. Brian Lagerstrom has talked about this on and off and half joked about how many lasagnas and cakes he and his partner have eaten to get a 15 minute youtube video up. And then someone else just steals that verbatim without any credit at all. So a lot of “recipe creators” are looking at methods to make sure they at least break even on their IP.
And Rea is very aware of this. Partially because he has a long history of using the exact same techniques that Kenji et al do without any accreditation (Alvin is REALLY good about saying where he got an idea though) and partially because he is pretty good friends with some of the most notorious recipe thiefs out there.
But yeah. If they had done a “going forward, all recipes are paywalled” I would not be too bothered. But he retroactively paywalled all his old recipes. Which sucks because many videos outright contained errors that weren’t in the text recipes because he screwed up the narration.
But also? The good news is that you can generally just google a few of the ingredients of a given recipe and get the “real” name of it and five different versions.
Many of his early recipes were actually direct copies of recipes from America Test Kitchen. Many word for word.
So it’s even extra shitty that he put his recipes behind a paywall because most of ATK’s recipes are available for free. (But buy their books! They are very good)
IMO, cookbooks are in a different category. While yes their recipes are copyright free, the organization by theme is worth their cost. When I was in college, I bought a Betty Crocker “5 ingredients 30 minutes” cookbook which is awesome for someone who is learning to cook. As I’ve developed skills I’ve gravitated toward cookbooks that teach the fundamentals and science of cooking that help explain what’s happening.