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 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.
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.
Licence & Royalty
You keep ownership. Restaurant groups, manufacturers, and hospitality brands build on your work under terms you set, indefinitely.
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Every asset scored against twenty criteria across originality, replicability, market appeal, and complexity. The number your negotiation stands on.
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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.
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NDAs, non-circumvention terms, licensing and sale agreements, trademark strategy, drafted specifically for culinary IP, not adapted from a generic template.
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A clean, full transfer of a single recipe, technique, or concept, sourced buyer, negotiated terms, closed transaction.
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You retain ownership. We structure and negotiate the ongoing terms, restaurant groups, CPG manufacturers, hospitality brands, so the upside stays yours.
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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.
Outright Sale
A full, clean transfer, one recipe, one technique, one concept. Privately negotiated, closed. For a defined exit, not an ongoing relationship.
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.