Building Books About Food

An interview with Jamin Galea, Senior Product Designer | Popsa

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We speak to Jamin Galea, a highly talented senior product designer who's built Books About Food, a global directory that's become the industry standard for beautifully designed cookbooks. What started as a personal Instagram account has grown into a database of nearly 2,000 cookbooks and 3,500 creative profiles.

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The Spark

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Ten years ago, Jamin found a beautiful cloth-bound cookbook in a Parisian bookshop. No food photos, just elegant patterns and typography. When he couldn't find it on Amazon back home, he had a realisation: someone needs to document these beautifully designed cookbooks and credit the people who make them.

He started posting cookbook covers on Instagram as a personal bookmark system. One post got featured and a thousand followers appeared overnight. Jamin kept posting multiple times a week, and the account kept growing. Now the @booksabout.food page is at 16k followers.

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From DMs to Database

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As the Instagram account grew, DMs started flooding in. "I need a photographer in Spain who's good at food photography. Do you know anyone?" People were using his posts as a resource.

Jamin spent lunch breaks at Waterstones photographing credit pages to tag designers, photographers and stylists. To manage requests, he built a spreadsheet tracking book titles, publishers and creative teams.

During lockdown, he mentioned this to Sam, an engineer friend from Soho House. Sam's response: "You have images and a spreadsheet. That's the foundation of a website. Let's build it."

At this stage, we have to give a big shout out to Sam who's been a true partner and driving force behind the site's build and evolution.

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Becoming an Industry Standard

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Cookbooks require at least six people to make: authors, recipe developers, photographers, food stylists, designers and indexers. Jamin saw an opportunity in mapping these creative networks.

"As we uploaded books, we started seeing patterns. This photographer really likes working with this stylist, they've done three books together." The site now shows portfolio pages for every creative, displaying their work and frequent collaborators.

The moment Jamin realised this was becoming something bigger? When he hosted a launch event for the website in a fairly obscure location in Farringdon and 100 people turned up. Entire creative teams came to show support.

Just before Christmas, someone from a publishing house messaged: "Getting featured on your website has become part of our brief."

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Balancing Time and Money

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Jamin is honest about the reality. "In terms of time management, I'd suggest you speak to my wife." It's evenings, weekends and his hour-long commute into London.

The site costs roughly £800 annually, split between Jamin and Sam, mostly for hosting and basic services. They're not making money yet, but they're exploring publisher-focused features like homepage promotions, full-page takeovers for authors and potentially a "best of" coffee table book.

"It's not a business yet. But we're thinking of ways to at least cover our costs."

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What Cookbooks Teach Product Designers

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"Cookbooks are the ultimate functional object," Jamin notes. There's extensive UX thinking involved: how ingredients are referenced, whether recipes span multiple pages, how indexing connects related recipes.

His favourite cookbook design? Polpo, from Russell Norman's Venetian restaurant. "A massive octopus on the front. Beautiful stitching. Doesn't look like a cookbook at all, but it's perfectly designed."

There's also an ongoing design debate. American publishers typically use food photos on covers, while UK, Australian and Scandinavian publishers are more adventurous with abstract designs. When Ottolenghi released a cookbook with different UK and US covers, Jamin called out the photo-heavy American version in the comments. A week later, the publisher announced they'd release the UK cover in America after all.

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Advice for Designer-Founders

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Jamin didn't start with a business plan. He started with genuine curiosity and let it grow organically. Structure came later, after a launch event drew 100 people, after publishers started requesting features, after the DMs became unmanageable without systems.

"I hope that at some point in the future, this becomes my full-time job. But right now, I just want to keep making it better and treat it as a resource people find useful."

For designers with ideas: start small, stay consistent, build systems to support organic growth. Jamin spent lunch breaks photographing credit pages for a decade. He built a spreadsheet before building a site. He posted multiple times a week for years before considering monetisation.

Collaborating and partnering with the right people is also key and in Jamin's case, he has an amazing engineering partner in Sam.

Books About Food now attracts 6,000 page views monthly with almost no promotion beyond Instagram. The lesson? Solve a real problem for a community you understand, and they'll find you.

Follow Books About Food on Instagram @booksabout.food or explore their directory at booksabout.food

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About Jamin:

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Jamin is a London-based digital product designer. Currently, Product Design Lead at Popsa.

Originally from the small island of Malta, Jamin learned how limitations can spark ambition—pairing pragmatism with big-picture thinking.

With over 15 years of multifaceted design experience, his work across web and native app interfaces isn’t just user-centred and visually refined; it tackles complexity, challenges assumptions and drives meaningful outcomes.

Check out >> Books About Food.