For Sanjam Kohli, food was always memory and culture, even while her career followed a path in tech. That personal connection led her to create Chefadora – an AI-powered recipe platform now used by cooks in 180 countries. In this profile, she reflects on her journey, the challenges of scaling and the mission to give home cooks a fair way to publish and earn.
Tell us a bit about yourself – what’s your background and what led you to the world of food and drink?
I started my career as a radio communications engineer before moving into product and user-experience design. Technology was always my world, but food was always my heart.
I grew up in a family where recipes were passed down through handwritten notes and stories. My mum still has a binder full of them, some even from my great-grandmother.
When I moved away from home, I’d constantly call her for those recipes. She’d send me WhatsApp photos or voice memos, and while the food always tasted great, the experience of following them was frustrating. That’s when I realised how hard it was for everyday cooks to share their food traditions online. That moment led me into food tech.
Tell us about the brand. What makes it unique?
Chefadora is a global food-blogging platform designed to make publishing and monetising recipes simple. Unlike traditional food blogs that require hosting, SEO, and endless setup, we strip away all the technical barriers.
Creators can paste a recipe in any format and our RecipeGenieAI instantly transforms it into a structured, SEO-friendly, beautifully formatted recipe. We share ad revenue with creators (55% to them, 45% to us), making publishing more than just likes; it’s a real income stream.
On the user side, Chefadora is home to the world’s first AI cooking assistant embedded directly in recipes. It answers real-time questions like “what does deglaze mean?” or “I ran out of soy sauce, what do I use instead?” without ever leaving the page.
Talk us through the journey of your brand. What have been some of the key achievements and challenges along the way?
We started in our kitchen in Sydney, trying to set up a food blog for my mum. Very quickly, we learned how complex and inaccessible blogging platforms were, especially for non-tech creators. That insight became Chefadora.
Some key milestones for us: reaching 100,000 monthly users across 180 countries, and hosting nearly 10,000 recipes from 100+ cuisines. One of our biggest challenges has been learning to scale. I was initially the bottleneck, handling everything myself. Building a team and creating systems has been transformational, allowing us to grow faster and focus on what matters most: supporting creators.
How has the Australian market responded to the brand and what has surprised you most?
Australia has a vibrant, multicultural food culture, so the response has been really positive. What surprised me most was how quickly creators outside Australia embraced us, from the US to India to African countries.
It reinforced that the challenge we’re solving is global: recipe creators everywhere struggle to publish and monetise. Seeing our first payouts to creators was a huge moment; it’s proof that we were helping people turn passion into income.
What is one thing you wish more people knew about the work you do?
I wish more people realised how hard it is for recipe creators to get fairly rewarded for their work. Behind every recipe is hours of testing, photographing, writing, and editing. Most platforms don’t pay them at all. Our mission is to change that, to make it possible for home cooks and creators to actually build a livelihood from sharing their food.
How do you see food and drink culture in Australia evolving and how does your brand fit in?
Food in Australia is becoming even more multicultural, experimental, and digitally driven. People are curious about cuisines from all over the world, but want them in formats that are accessible and personalised.
That’s where Chefadora comes in: making it easy for anyone to share their cultural food heritage, and for users to cook it with AI-powered help. We’re also working with councils to bring this online community offline. We’re planning a multicultural food festival in South Australia that will bring 10,000+ people together to celebrate food, culture, and diversity.
What keeps you inspired as a founder?
The creators. Every time a home cook publishes their first recipe and messages us saying, “I never thought I could do this,” it fuels me. Food is about memory, culture, and connection, and seeing people share their family recipes with the world and get paid for it keeps me going.
What’s next for you and the brand?
The next 12 months are about scale. We’re aiming to grow from 100k to 10 million monthly users. We’re rolling out multilingual publishing in 80+ languages, launching a creator–brand marketplace, introducing subscriptions for AI power users, and expanding our AI features – from voice interaction to photo recognition.
And we’re building community offline too, with our first creator event in the US in partnership with The Content Kitchen.
And finally, what do you like to do when you’re not at work?
Walks on the beach with my husband and co-founder, Div and our dog, Coco – Chefadora’s ‘Chief Mental Health Officer’.
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