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Antiwork

Does my employer own my recipes?

I started a job a few months ago in a start up kitchen. The owner basically told me what she wanted and I created the recipes. She has no kitchen skills so it was all me, she just had the ideas. After a bunch of sketchy things happening, including editing my hours to pay me less, I quit and took my recipes with me. Now she’s demanding I send them to her. I never signed any contract about the recipes, never signed a non compete thing, and we never actually made any money off of them or sold them. So do I have to send them to her or can I just continue to ignore her? Edit: thanks everyone for your advise! I’m going to be ignoring it until I can’t (story of my life) and probably giving her bad recipes. I remember taking extra time reading what I was…


I started a job a few months ago in a start up kitchen. The owner basically told me what she wanted and I created the recipes. She has no kitchen skills so it was all me, she just had the ideas.

After a bunch of sketchy things happening, including editing my hours to pay me less, I quit and took my recipes with me. Now she’s demanding I send them to her.

I never signed any contract about the recipes, never signed a non compete thing, and we never actually made any money off of them or sold them.

So do I have to send them to her or can I just continue to ignore her?

Edit: thanks everyone for your advise! I’m going to be ignoring it until I can’t (story of my life) and probably giving her bad recipes. I remember taking extra time reading what I was signing and it was general employee onboarding paperwork not relating to kitchen work. I wasn’t even hired to be the head of the kitchen. I just showed up on my first day and they’re like “here you go you have to create everything”. She also lives and travels from the other side of the country so unless she wants to spend time in the “shitty” state I live in to sue me or whatever I think it will be fine..

There was also someone before me that made things and when I asked for those recipes to go off of, there weren’t any so idk, maybe she won’t care enough to harass me.

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