A recipe platform is quietly growing. Week after week, more recipes arrive. The editors publish them. Users love them.
Then the business wants to do something new: license recipes to grocery retailers, power voice-enabled cooking, expand onto new platforms. Suddenly, everything breaks. Ingredients aren’t standardized. Metadata is inconsistent. Nothing was built to travel.
That’s the kind of problem Sandie Markle solves.
As founder and CEO of Blueberri, Sandie helps food creators, recipe platforms, and food technology companies build structured content systems that improve discoverability, scalability, and future readiness. With 18 years spent at the intersection of food, technology, and content operations, she has spent her career making visible the invisible systems that hold organizations together. Most executives talk about content strategy. Sandie builds the architecture that makes strategy actually work at scale.
The Foundation Before the Building
She didn’t start out thinking about systems. She started out thinking about people.
In 2005, Sandie was working in finance at Miami-Dade County Public Schools, managing payroll for 350 employees. The work was precise, methodical, and deeply unglamorous. It taught her something essential: systems either serve people or crush them. There was no middle ground.
She eventually moved into the food industry. Working her way into content roles at SideChef, a food-tech platform, she started as a content curator, uploading recipes and proofing images. But while everyone else celebrated database growth, Sandie asked a different question: how is this organized?
By 2016, she was a content manager. By 2018, leading a team. By 2022, Senior Director of Content Engineering. Each role wasn’t a promotion. It was a deepening, adding layers of understanding about what happens when talented people try to do good work inside broken systems.
At SideChef, she built a recipe database from 7,000 recipes to over 20,000. But the real work wasn’t the number. It was making those recipes work together. She standardized ingredient names. She created metadata rules. She built taxonomy systems. She debated terminology with engineers and product teams.
Three years later, when a global grocery partnership needed those recipes to be machine-readable and platform-agnostic, the foundation she’d built made it possible. “The most important work is often the work that doesn’t look important at the time,” she reflected years later, remembering those quiet hours spent organizing information most users would never see.
That’s when she understood: structure creates possibility.
The Architect Emerges
In 2024, after nine years building content systems at SideChef, Sandie was laid off. In that moment, she had a choice: find another similar role, or build something entirely new.
She chose to build. Blueberri launched as a consulting firm rooted in one core belief: most content problems aren’t actually content problems. They’re systems problems.
Today, that philosophy shapes everything she does. “I used to think every content problem needed a content solution. But the same problems kept showing up on different teams. That’s when I became much more interested in systems. If talented people keep struggling in the same place, it’s worth asking what the environment is teaching them.”
Her work spans auditing operations, designing workflows, building metadata strategies, and serving as a fractional Chief Content Officer for teams seeking guidance without full-time overhead. She developed several frameworks that guide her consulting: COSE (Create, Organize, Share, Expand), which focuses on structured content and scalable publishing. MAP (Meaning, Alignment, Platforms), which helps organizations create shared language across teams. ARC (Awareness, Reframe, Connect), which guides content professionals through role ambiguity and helps them contribute more effectively across their organizations.
What ties them together is systems thinking put into practice. Rather than focusing on theory, each framework helps people solve real organizational challenges by creating clarity, improving collaboration, and building content systems that can adapt as organizations grow.
“The teams I’ve seen move the fastest weren’t necessarily the most experienced. They shared an understanding of how decisions got made,” Sandie says. “Most workplace friction starts long before anyone notices it. A role becomes unclear, then a decision gets deferred and then an assumption goes unspoken. A month later everyone feels the weight of it.”
She’s also an educator. Her first book, Create Once, Share Everywhere, will be published in spring 2027. Written for food creators, bloggers, recipe developers, and creator businesses, the book helps readers rethink content as a long-term business asset rather than individual posts. It shows how structured content creates more discoverable, reusable, adaptable content and gives readers a practical framework for building content that continues creating value long after it’s published.
As AI reshapes how people discover information, the underlying content structure is now more important than ever. Structured content, metadata, and taxonomy are no longer simply operational details. They’re the foundation that helps content remain discoverable, reusable, and valuable across websites, AI assistants, connected devices, and future platforms.
“Content isn’t valuable just because it exists,” she explains. “It’s valuable when people can find it, trust it, reuse it, and put it to work.”
The Markle Playbook: Five Lessons
Lesson 1: Invisible work is strategic work. The most important systems inside organizations rarely receive the same attention as product launches. Make that work visible so teams recognize its value.
Lesson 2: Structure doesn’t limit creativity. Chaos does. When content is organized consistently, information becomes reusable. When it’s chaotic, talented people spend all their time recreating what already exists.
Lesson 3: Shared understanding moves faster than speed. Teams don’t get faster by working harder. They move faster when everyone understands how decisions get made and what actually matters.
Lesson 4: Your job title shouldn’t limit your impact. Some of the most valuable opportunities come from learning how adjacent teams work. Curiosity across disciplines creates the connections others miss.
Lesson 5: Content is infrastructure, not decoration. Treat it as such. Build it with the same intentionality you’d use to build a foundation. Everything else depends on it.
The Systems That Scale
A recipe platform is growing. The recipes are published. The users love them. The business wants to expand.
This time, because someone understood that content is infrastructure, because someone spent hours building architecture nobody saw, the team doesn’t have to stop. They don’t have to go backward. They can move forward.
As content continues to be interconnected and machine-readable, organizations can no longer afford to think of content as something created for a single website or channel. Sandie Markle believes the future belongs to teams that treat content as strategic infrastructure. Through Blueberri, her writing, speaking, and upcoming book, she’s helping organizations build content systems that are ready not just for today’s platforms, but for whatever comes next.
Sandie Markle is the founder and CEO of Blueberri, a consulting firm that helps food creators, recipe platforms, and food technology companies build structured content systems that improve discoverability, scalability, and future readiness. Based in Portland, Oregon, she works with teams on content strategy, operations, metadata, taxonomy, and workflow design. To connect with Sandie or lea
