A caramel slice and baklava have ignited a legal food fight across the Tasman. Best-selling Australian food blogger and author Nagi Maehashi, behind the blog RecipeTin Eats, recently alleged that copyright in her published recipes was infringed by bakery owner and social media personality Brooke Bellamy. 

The dispute has stirred a broader conversation about the type of works that copyright can protect. We dish out the details in this article.

What’s cooking with the recipe battle?

In a recent blog post, Maehashi claimed that her recipes for caramel slice and baklava, including exact quantities and techniques, were reproduced in Bellamy’s cookbook, Bake with Brooki.

Both Maehashi and Bellamy had cookbooks shortlisted for the 2025 Australian Book Industry Awards, with Bellamy’s book being the one that Maehashi alleged contains the infringing recipes.

Maehashi’s blog post described how her caramel slice recipe was the result of a long development process that led her to specifically choosing not to use golden syrup, an ingredient also absent from Bellamy’s recipe.

Maehashi explained that she wrote to Bellamy’s publisher about her concerns but the publisher rejected the claims. 

Bellamy also responded on her Instagram page to Maehashi’s allegations, asserting that the recipes in Bellamy’s book were developed over many years and were not plagiarised. Bellamy claimed to have been making and selling her caramel slice four years before Maehashi published her recipe. Nonetheless, Bellamy offered to remove both of her recipes from future reprints of her cookbook.

We compared Maehashi’s and Bellamy’s caramel slice and baklava recipes that were featured in Maehashi’s blog post. While the ingredients and instructions in the recipes bear obvious similarities, these similarities largely appear to relate to factual and functional aspects for creating what would be commonly recognised as caramel slice or baklava. Even Maehashi concedes that her baklava recipe is adapted from another source, which is not surprising because baklava has been made for hundreds of years.

Maehashi has since observed that a revised edition of Bake with Brooki has been released, featuring a different caramel slice recipe, this time using golden syrup as an ingredient.

New Zealand’s copyright laws

In New Zealand, copyright subsists automatically on creation of an original work. Originality has a low threshold – it must not be a copy, and must be the result of a sufficient amount of the author’s own skill, judgment, and effort.

Importantly, copyright protects the original expression of an idea in a tangible form – it does not protect the idea itself. Copyright will also not protect functional or factual attributes. This distinction ensures that creators can have rights in their specific expression of an idea, without unduly restricting others from expressing the same ideas independently.

So, can copyright protect recipes?

Yes, copyright would subsist in an original literary work recording a recipe.  But this would only provide protection insofar as the work is original. The long and extensive history of the culinary arts means that it would probably be challenging to develop a wholly original recipe. And it could be difficult to establish that copyright subsists in literary works recording simple recipes or prior-known recipes that have been adapted with minimal variation.

Copyright would also subsist in original artistic works (eg photos of the cooking process and final product), sound recordings (eg of oral recitations of recipes and instructions), films (eg of the cooking process), and typographical arrangements (eg the layout in a published book).

If a work is protected by copyright in New Zealand, copying it without permission or proper attribution may amount to infringement and could also infringe the author’s moral rights, such as an author’s right of attribution.

Other types of intellectual property could also protect aspects of a recipe, such as a distinctive recipe name (that could potentially be registered as trade mark).

Final thoughts

While aspects of recipes are potentially protectable by intellectual property rights, the challenge of creating wholly original recipes means that there are inherent limitations. And culinary art, like visual art and fashion, often feeds on existing sources for inspiration, leading to inevitable similarities between the old and the “new”.  

Accordingly, while culinary artists can take advantage of intellectual property laws to protect themselves in the best way possible, other culinary artists are likewise able to exploit what intellectual property rights do not protect.

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if you would like to discuss how any of the above may affect your business, please get in touch with one of our experts.

Special thanks to Priya Prakash and Pippa Saunders for their assistance in writing this article.