Recipes have always moved around freely. They get handed down, written out for friends, posted online and adapted by whoever finds them, and the question of who owns one almost never comes up.
In 2025 however, it came up loudly. Penguin Random House Australia had published Bake with Brooki, the debut cookbook by Brisbane baker Brooke Bellamy, in October 2024, and it went on to sell close to 100,000 copies. By the end of the following April, Bellamy was being publicly accused of lifting recipes from two other food writers. The story ran for weeks, drew in a publisher, a second author and a good deal of legal commentary.
Nagi Maehashi, who runs RecipeTin Eats, made the first allegation on Instagram. She named a caramel slice and a baklava she had published in 2020 and 2018, and said the similarities were so specific and detailed that calling them a coincidence felt disingenuous. Sally McKenney of Sally’s Baking Addiction followed with a claim about a vanilla cake. Bellamy denied everything through her lawyers, saying the book held 100 recipes she had created over many years. Maehashi asked for the book to be withdrawn, for attribution or removal in future reprints, and for a donation to charity. None of those demands were met, no court was ever asked to rule on any of it, and she eventually stopped corresponding altogether.
Unfortunately, it was Nagi Maehashi herself who explained the hopelessness of the legal conundrum. In a long post on her own site she said the similarities were too specific to be coincidence, then accepted, almost in the same breath, that what she was describing might not be copyright infringement at all. Her complaint was really one of plagiarism, which is an ethical objection rather than a cause of action.
That difference is not a technicality. Plagiarism is a question of credit, settled if at all between authors and publishers, while infringement is a question for a court. Only the second is a legal claim, which is why this dispute never became one.
Most food business owners would assume the relevant law here is copyright. In practice it is trademark law, which protects the name a business trades under rather than the written text of a recipe. For anyone launching a food brand, the budget is better spent clearing that name with a trademark lawyer than protecting the recipes.
What copyright protections can and cannot do
Writing in The Conversation, Daniela Simone of Macquarie University put the position plainly: you cannot copyright a recipe, although you may be able to protect the particular way it has been expressed.
There are two reasons for that. The first is that copyright covers the way something is written rather than the idea behind it. In a recipe that leaves the ingredients, the quantities, the basic method and the standard layout free for anyone to use. The second is that copyright only covers material that has been written down or otherwise recorded, so your grandmother’s lemon slice, made from memory and never committed to paper, is not a copyright work at all. On much the same reasoning, a European court held that the taste of a cheese could not be protected either.
What that leaves is the written explanation. Section 32 of the Copyright Act 1968 protects original literary works and it does not ask for much: a recipe will usually qualify as long as it is not a straight copy of someone else’s and some thought went into the writing of it. Fairly ordinary documents pass that test all the time. Very simple recipes sometimes do not, because there is barely any room to describe them in an original way.
Proving infringement is harder still. Baking the cake is not an infringement, since a cake is too far removed in form from the words to count as a copy of them, and the simpler the recipe the closer to verbatim a copy has to be before a court will find against the copier. Independent creation is also a complete defence, which is precisely the answer Bellamy gave.
The practical result is that a competitor who retypes your method word for word has a problem, while one who reads it, notes the ratios and writes their own version very probably does not. Nearly every recipe dispute in this country sits somewhere in between, and the harder question, as Simone frames it, is where copyright should draw its line between inspiration and infringement.
Anzac biscuits, and what Australia does protect
There is one Australian recipe the law guards closely, and the way it goes about it is quite instructive. Under the Protection of Word “Anzac” Act 1920 and the regulations made under it, you cannot commercially produce and sell biscuits called Anzac unless they are made to a specific recipe and shape.
The thing being regulated there is the word, and the recipe appears only as a condition attached to using it. Anyone is free to bake and sell an identical biscuit provided they call it something else, which means that even in the one case where Australian law protects a recipe, what it is really protecting is a name.
Brand protection works the same way across the board. Under the Trade Marks Act, a registered trade mark is a sign used to distinguish your goods or services from those of other traders, and registration gives you an exclusive statutory right across the classes you register, running for ten years from the filing date, together with a cause of action under section 120 against anyone using a substantially identical or deceptively similar mark on similar goods or services.
Traders without a registration are not entirely without options, since passing off and section 18 of the Australian Consumer Law will both restrain a competitor trading off an established reputation, but each of those requires you to prove the reputation before you get anywhere near the infringement question, and proving reputation is slow, expensive and heavy on evidence. Registration removes that step. Dominique Ansel could never have stopped anyone making a croissant and doughnut hybrid, and plenty of bakeries did, but because he held the name Cronut every one of them had to sell it under a worse word.
