Somewhere in your kitchen is an asset
nobody has ever formally valued.

Somebody is going to get rich off your work.
Make sure it's you.

Every kitchen, every menu, every food brand has something nobody bothered to protect, a technique, a concept, a flavour signature, a story. Culius finds it, prices it, and sells it, or licenses it, before someone else does it for free.

THE LAST UNPROTECTED CRAFT €10

Why Culinary Creativity Deserves Real Protection

A chef spends years perfecting something. Someone else takes it. There's nothing she can do about it.

That's not a hypothetical. It happened this year, in full public view, to one of the most successful recipe creators alive, with real legal counsel behind her. No lawsuit was ever filed. No court ever ruled. She simply had no enforceable claim, because the law protects the words on a page, not the dish itself.

If that surprises you, this book is for you.

What this book is actually about

Cooking is very likely the oldest creative act our species has ever practiced. It's also very nearly the only creative field that has never developed a real system for protecting the people who practice it. Music has copyright. Invention has patents. Cooking has almost nothing, and most chefs have no idea how exposed that leaves them until the moment it actually matters.

Written by a chef with thirty years in professional kitchens, The Last Unprotected Craft is not a legal textbook and not a business pitch. It's a plain, honest, occasionally uncomfortable look at why this gap exists, what actually holds up when a chef's work is challenged, and what any working cook can start doing about it today.

Inside, you'll find:

  • The real reason copyright law can't reach most recipes, explained in plain language

  • What Coca-Cola and KFC actually protected, and why it wasn't secrecy

  • The full story behind this year's biggest public recipe dispute, and what it proves

  • The genuinely hard question of family recipes, tradition, and who owns what

  • What trade secret and trademark law can actually do for you, right now

  • A practical, honest test for knowing what in your own work is worth protecting

Who it's for

Chefs. Bakers. Recipe developers. Anyone who has built something in a kitchen worth more than the single service it gets tonight, and has never quite known what to do about that.

A note on what this isn't

This book doesn't sell you anything beyond itself. It's not a pitch for any company, mine included. It's the case I wish someone had made to me, and to every chef I've watched lose something real, twenty years before either of us understood what was actually happening.

"Secrecy protects a recipe for as long as you personally hold the door shut. Documentation protects it even after you let go of the handle."

Deborah Wehrens spent thirty years as a professional chef before founding Culius, the world's first private culinary IP brokerage. She lives and works in Tongeren, Belgium.

Buy It Here

The food industry is waking up to its unprotected value.

Chefs, restaurants, and food brands spend decades perfecting recipes, processes, trade dress, and brand identity. Yet, when it comes to valuation and protection, these core assets are often left completely exposed.

Culius acts as the critical bridge between the high-pressure reality of the professional kitchen and the rigorous world of intellectual property law. We help you identify, codify, protect, and monetize your culinary DNA.

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Strategic Culinary Protection

Six practice areas, run as a single engagement. You don't hire us piece by piece, you open one case, and we carry it through.

  • Every asset independently scored under the Culinary Asset Valuation Method, across sourcing resilience, technique transferability, legal classification, and commercial format fit. A number out of 100, and a tier, Select™, Premium™, or Elite™, your negotiation actually stands on.

  • Origin research, technique mapping, authorship verification. We build the paper trail that lets your work survive a buyer's due diligence, not just their tasting.

  • NDAs, non-circumvention terms, licensing and sale agreements, trademark strategy, drafted specifically for culinary IP, not adapted from a generic template.

  • A clean, full transfer of a single recipe, technique, or concept, sourced buyer, negotiated terms, closed transaction.

  • You retain ownership. We structure and negotiate the ongoing terms, restaurant groups, CPG manufacturers, hospitality brands, so the upside stays yours.

  • From CPG co-packer specification to hotel and airline programme fit, we match the asset to the buyer category actually built to want it, and make the introduction ourselves.

Founder and Managing Director

Deborah Wehrens

With over 30 years of experience traversing the high-stakes environments of professional European kitchens, Deborah Wehrens understands the visceral reality of food craft.

Transitioning from chef to culinary IP strategist, she recognized a glaring void: the culinary world creates immense cultural and financial value, yet fundamentally lacks the mechanisms to own it. Culius was born to close this gap.

Today, she advises leading restaurant groups, visionary chefs, foodbloggers and emerging food brands across the world on how to translate their culinary craft into enduring, protected assets and get them licensed or sold to big corporations working in hotels, catering, airlines, cruises, rail, retail, QSR and institutional.