Two of Australia’s most popular and beloved food authors have been embroiled a legal feud over the ownership of recipes.
RecipeTin Eats founder and best-selling author Nagi Maehashi has accused Brooke Bellamy, owner of Brisbane’s Brooki Bakehouse of plagiarising two of her recipes in Bellamy’s debut cookbook last October. Bellamy has strongly denied these allegations. Since then, the internet has gone wild with supporters and fellow bakers and chefs weighing in on the controversy. Let’s take a look at the scope of the battle.
What happened?
On Tuesday, Maehashi posted a statement on Instagram, telling her 1.6 million followers that Bellamy had plagiarised her recipes for caramel slice and baklava in the “multimillion dollar book” she published last year, titled Bake with Brooki.
Maehashi said she had made allegations against the book’s publisher, Penguin Australia, back in December last year, but that they have denied the allegations, stating (through lawyers) that Bellamy “respectfully rejects your…allegations and confirms that the recipes in bake with Bookie were written by Brooke Bellamy.”
Addressing the publisher in her statement, Maehashi described them as “a top tier publisher entrusted with protecting original work and upholding the integrity of the publishing industry.”
“That you have continued to sell the book after I bought this to your attention back on 4th of December 2024 is disgraceful and your lack of accountability is profoundly disappointing,” Maehashi said.
She explained that she was not unaccustomed to seeing her recipes being copied online, but that “seeing what I believe to be my recipes and my words printed in a multimillion dollar book launched with a huge publicity campaign from one of Australia’s biggest publishers was shocking.”
According to the Nielsen BookScan, Bellamy’s book has sold 92,849 copies in the last six months.
“That’s 4.6 million worth of sales,” Maehashi said, adding side-by-side screenshots of her recipes with that of Bellamy’s to “invite [viewers] to review comparisons of my recipes in question and form your own view.”
“To me the similarities are so specific and detailed that calling these a coincidence feels disingenuous,” she said.
Maehashi said that she has written to both Bellamy and Penguin in a personal capacity about the issue before going public.
“I’m speaking up because staying silent protects this kind of behaviour profiting from plagiarised recipes is unethical, even if not a copyright breach and it’s a slap in the face to every author who puts in the hard work to create original content rather than cutting corners,” she wrote.
“Even a single recipe taken without credit breaches trust, and calls the integrity of the entire book into question. I put a huge amount of effort into my recipes and I share them on my website for anyone to use for free. To see them plagiarised in my view and used in a book for profit without credit doesn’t just feel unfair. It feels like a blatant exploitation of my work.”
She went on to describe the alleged plagiarism as not “just legally questionable”, but “ethically indefensible.”
She ended her statement by directly addressing Bellamy: “It didn’t have to be like this. Had you asked, I would have given permission [and]…proudly promoted your book on launch. It costs nothing to credit.”
In the first few hours of the post going live, Maehashi received hundreds of supportive comments. By the following day however, she had closed the comments section, writing in an updated post that she “had to turn off comments because there is additional risk of legal action being brought against me by Penguin and Brooki by what you say.”
She thanked her supporters, adding “I was so nervous and worried.”
Bellamy’s response
On Tuesday night, Bellamy responded on Instagram, posting a statement in her stories claiming she did not plagiarise any recipes in her book.
“[My book] consists of 100 recipes I have created over many years, since falling in love with baking and growing up baking with my mum in our home kitchen,” she wrote. “In 2016 I opened my first bakery. I have been creating my recipes and selling them commercially since October 2016.”
Responding to the specific claim regarding the plagiarism of the recipe for caramel slice, she wrote, “On March 2020, Recipetin Eats published a recipe for caramel slice. It uses the same ingredients as my recipe, which I have been making and selling since four years prior.”
She went on to say that she had offered to remove the recipes for the slice and the baklava from “future reprints to prevent further aggravation”, and that she has “great respect” for Maehashi.
“Recipe development in today’s world is enveloped in inspiration from other cooks, cookbook authors, food bloggers and content creators. This willingness to share recipes and build on what has come before is what I love so much about baking and sharing recipes.”
“I stand by my love for baking, my recipes, and the joy this book has brought so many home bakers around the world eager to try recreating my recipes from inside their homes.”
Earlier this morning, Maehashi posted a response to Bellamy’s retort regarding the date of original publication of the caramel slice recipe on her own Instagram stories, sharing a screenshot of her caramel slice which she’d published in April 2016.
What else has happened since?
In her original post on Tuesday, Maehashi also mentioned that she did not have “the skills or resources” to examine Bellamy’s book “thoroughly” to see if there were other recipes that could have been plagiarised.
However, she said that “There are also recipes from other authors, including from a very well-known beloved cookbook author, where the similarities are so extensive dismissing it as coincidence would be absurd, in my opinion.”
In the past 24 hours, another popular internet baker has come out to claim that Bellamy had plagiarised her recipes.
Sallysbakeblog founder and US-based baker Sally McKenny wrote on her socials, “Nagi, you know how much I admire and support you – and I’m so grateful you let me know months ago that one of my recipes (The Best Vanilla Cake I’ve Ever Had, published by me in 2019) was also plagiarised in this book and also appears on the author’s YouTube channel.”
“Original recipe creators who put in the work to develop and test recipes deserve credit, especially in a best-selling cookbook.”
Maehashi responded in a repost of McKenny’s post, thanking her for coming forward and claiming she had “recognised her vanilla cake because I’ve made it and it’s unique (it uses buttermilk).”
“I know you, like me, would never say something like this lightly,” Maehashi said.
How has Bellamy responded to these fresh claims?
Bellamy has come out to deny copying the recipes, saying in a statement “I do not copy other people’s recipes.”
“The past 24 hours have been extremely overwhelming,” she explained. “I have had media outside my home and business, and have been attacked online. It has been deeply distressing for my colleagues and my young family.”
“Like many bakers, I draw inspiration from the classics, but the creations you see at Brooki Bakehouse reflect my own experience, taste, and passion for baking, born of countless hours of my childhood spent in my home kitchen with Mum. While baking has leeway for creativity, much of it is a precise science and is necessarily formulaic.”
“Many recipes are bound to share common steps and measures: if they don’t, they simply don’t work. My priority right now is to ensure the welfare of the fantastic team at Brooki Bakehouse and that of my family.”
Bellamy runs three Brooki Bakehouse stores across Queensland, and boasts a large social media platform, with two million TikTok followers. This morning, The Daily Telegraph reported that Bellamy has been dropped as an Academy for Enterprising Girls ambassador, a role funded by the federal government.
“Brooke Bellamy was recently engaged to conduct a small number of promotional activities for the Academy for Enterprising Girls program over the coming months,” a spokesperson for the academy told the newspaper.
“While we make no legal assessment on the allegations aired in the media, we have informed Bellamy we will not move forward with the engagement at this time.”
Critics weigh in
On Sunrise this morning, legal historian and intellectual property scholar, Professor Isabella Alexander explained the difference between plagiarism and copyright.
“Plagiarism is just copying someone’s idea without giving them credit for it, but copyright law has a lot more specificity because it is a legal action,” she said. “You need to prove that you created the recipe yourself. That it is an original work and that the person who copied it, copied the entirety of the recipe or a substantial part of it. And the part that they copied is the intellectual contribution that you, as the author, brought to it.”
“It is possible [to plagiarise a recipe]. This might surprise a lot of people but, because it is a literary work, it falls within the literary act. We are not talking about copying a cake itself or a slice itself or the idea of cooking a slice, but it is the actual words on the page that explain what the ingredient are and how you cook. That could be potentially protected by copyright law.”
She added that “these cases are hard to prove and very expensive to bring, so that is why you don’t see very many of them.”
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