From Documents to Processes: Why We Believe it is Appropriate to Rethink the Digital Recipe

For centuries, recipes have been among humanity’s most enduring forms of knowledge. They have crossed continents, survived generations, adapted to changing ingredients, and quietly documented the evolution of cultures. Yet despite their importance, the digital world still treats recipes primarily as documents.

A recipe is usually represented as a title, a list of ingredients, and a sequence of instructions. Whether stored in a cookbook, a spreadsheet, a mobile application, or a structured file format, the underlying assumption remains remarkably similar: a recipe is a document to be read.

Image: GPT5.6 - Julia Child & Jacques-Yves Cousteau as inspiration on the diversity of recipes world wide

But is that really what a recipe is?

We believe the answer is no.

A recipe is not fundamentally a document.

It is a transformation process.

Every recipe begins with an initial state. Ingredients possess physical, chemical, and biological properties. Through a sequence of operations—mixing, heating, fermenting, resting, cooling, emulsifying, drying, seasoning, or countless other transformations—those initial states evolve into something entirely new.

The recipe does not simply describe food.

It describes how food changes.

This distinction may appear subtle, yet it has profound implications.

Once recipes are viewed as transformation processes rather than static documents, they become easier to understand, analyse, compare, simulate, validate, and eventually reproduce. Every operation becomes part of a chain of state transitions. Every condition—temperature, time, pressure, humidity, equipment, ingredient order, or environmental factor—contributes to the evolution of the final product.

Seen through this lens, recipes begin to resemble workflows, manufacturing processes, or scientific protocols far more than they resemble text.

This perspective is equally relevant in a home kitchen and on an industrial production line. The same conceptual model can describe baking bread, fermenting kimchi, producing chocolate, roasting coffee, brewing beer, creating plant-based alternatives, or manufacturing complex food products at scale.

Importantly, this way of thinking does not seek to replace existing recipes or invalidate traditional formats.

On the contrary.

Millions of recipes already exist in books, databases, enterprise systems, websites, and personal collections. They represent an extraordinary body of human knowledge. Rather than replacing this heritage, we believe the future lies in making these existing recipes interoperable through richer semantic representations that preserve their meaning while enabling new capabilities.

This philosophy is at the heart of the emerging AJX Recipe initiative.

Photo: Alexander Mitchell for the FAJX ( Ajinomatrix Foundation - www.ajinomatrix.net )

Rather than asking, “How should recipes be stored?”, we first ask a more fundamental question:

What is a recipe?

Only after answering that question does it become meaningful to design digital standards capable of representing recipes faithfully across software systems, organisations, and generations.

This perspective also opens exciting possibilities for the future. Recipes may one day be linked directly to sensory observations, analytical measurements, sustainability metrics, manufacturing data, robotic execution, artificial intelligence, and digital twins of food production. These possibilities emerge not because recipes become more complicated, but because they become more accurately represented.

The digital transformation of food should not begin with a new file format.

It should begin with a better understanding of what recipes have always been.

Not documents.

Processes.

And perhaps that small shift in perspective is the first step toward a more interoperable, reproducible, and enduring digital future for food.

This article is the first in a series exploring the future of digital recipes, open standards, and sensory knowledge. In upcoming articles, we will examine why today’s recipe formats remain fragmented, how interoperability can be achieved without abandoning existing systems, and how process-oriented representations can bridge culinary tradition, industrial food production, and sensory science.