In 2013, South African chef Ruben Riffel — owner of restaurants in Franschhoek and Cape Town, a man with a reputation as a meticulous perfectionist — publicly accused the Nando's chain of stealing the recipe for his signature peri-peri sauce. The conflict ended with a confidential settlement a year later, but raised a question no one has resolved: who actually owns a flavor if it's been invented several times over five hundred years?
Capsicum frutescens — that very hot pepper Europeans call "bird's eye" and the Portuguese christened piri-piri (in Swahili — "pepper-pepper," tautology as a form of respect) — originates from Central America. It was domesticated by indigenous peoples long before Columbus mistook the Caribbean for India. Portuguese sailors of the 15th-16th centuries brought seeds to Mozambique, where the pepper took root so organically that within two centuries it was considered local.
The Portuguese cooked seafood with garlic, olive oil, and vinegar — the classic acid-fat triad of medieval Europe. In Mozambique, local birds-eye chili and lemon juice were added to this base. The result was a sauce that can't be called either Portuguese or African — more a hybrid of two colonial streams. The Portuguese brought preservation technology in acid, Africans provided heat and citrus sharpness. The sauce became part of Maputo street cuisine, then migrated to Johannesburg with the wave of immigrants after Mozambique gained independence in 1975.
By the early 1980s, peri-peri was everyday fast food in Portuguese quarters of South Africa — no patents, no brands, just chicken with sauce from a jar made by dozens of small producers. Recipes varied from family to family: some added more paprika, some ginger, some let the mixture steep for a week, others for a day.
In 1987, Robbie Brozin and Fernando Duarte — both Portuguese-Mozambican immigrants — bought a shabby joint called Chickenland in Johannesburg. The place sold fried chicken under a sauce prepared by a local cook using his grandmother's recipe from Maputo. Brozin and Duarte renamed it Nando's (taking the name from Fernando's diminutive), standardized the recipe, and bet on marketing: peri-peri was positioned as "authentic South African cuisine of Mozambican origin."
By the mid-1990s, the chain expanded to the UK — there the sauce hit the mark: Britons, accustomed to Indian curry and Chinese sweet-and-spicy variations, embraced peri-peri as an exotic with comfortable heat. In 2022, Nando's had 1,200+ restaurants in 30 countries, with turnover reaching £1.5 billion. Britain became the largest market — there the brand turned into a cultural phenomenon, mentioned by rappers, joked about by comedians, where students go after exams.
But in South Africa, Nando's faced a problem: local chefs began developing their own versions of peri-peri, some with ambitions for commercial production. Ruben Riffel was one of them. From the early 2000s he experimented with the balance of acid, sugar, and capsaicin, trying to create a sauce that would work not just with chicken, but with fish, lamb, vegetables. Riffel claimed he found a formula that gives "volumetric" heat — not a one-dimensional punch, but a wave with aftertaste.
In 2013, Riffel stated that Nando's copied his recipe through former employees or suppliers. He pointed to the bottled sauce the corporation launched in supermarkets in South Africa, Britain, and Australia — the flavor profile, he said, was "suspiciously identical." Riffel presented no public evidence, but threatened a lawsuit.
Nando's responded with a standard line: "Our recipe is based on traditions of Mozambican cuisine and was developed by our technologists since 1987." Formally this is true — the basic formula was indeed with the founders from day one. But the question is in the nuances: if Riffel added, say, fermented lemon juice instead of fresh, and a year later the same technique appeared in Nando's industrial version — is that coincidence or leak?
The dispute was closed with a confidential settlement in 2014. Terms were not disclosed. Riffel no longer commented on the topic. Nando's continued selling sauce, volumes grew. In 2013, the British patent office was considering another case — Nando's versus the Ndinos trademark, which also sold peri-peri. The corporation was defending not the recipe (which can't be patented like a chemical formula), but the brand and visual identity.
The paradox of peri-peri is that it has no single author. Indigenous Americans domesticated the pepper, the Portuguese brought it to Africa, Mozambican cooks adapted European techniques to local products, South African immigrants standardized the recipe for street trade, and a transnational corporation scaled it to a billion pounds in revenue. At what stage did intellectual property arise?
Legally — never. Food recipes aren't protected by patents in the same sense as inventions or software. You can patent a production method (for example, fermentation at a specific temperature), but not flavor. You can register a trademark for a sauce name, but not for the combination of pepper, garlic, and vinegar — that's public domain.
Nando's protects its version as a trade secret. Exact proportions, mixing sequence, aging time — all stored in closed documents. But if someone recreates the flavor through reverse engineering (buys a bottle, does chemical analysis, selects analogues), that's legal. This is exactly how the food industry works: first someone invents, then ten competitors copy, then the market saturates and everyone shifts to brand warfare.
Riffel claimed he was robbed not through analysis, but through insiders. Proving this is impossible without intercepted emails or witness testimony. The confidential settlement could mean anything: compensation payout, licensing agreement, mutual obligation to silence, or simply legal fatigue on both sides.
The history of peri-peri is a textbook on cultural appropriation, only without villains. The Portuguese didn't steal pepper from Americans — they simply transported seeds as part of the Columbian Exchange, the global flow of plants, animals, and diseases between continents. Mozambican cooks didn't appropriate Portuguese techniques — they adapted them to local conditions because vinegar and oil were more accessible than traditional African preservatives. Nando's didn't rob Mozambican culture — the founders themselves were carriers of that culture, and their success helped popularize cuisine that was unknown in Europe.
But the result is the same as in classic colonialism: profit concentrates in the hands of those who control distribution. Mozambican grandmothers who cooked peri-peri over coals for three hundred years received not a cent from the £1.5 billion revenue. Portuguese sailors of the 16th century have been dead five hundred years. Indigenous Americans who domesticated the pepper don't even know their legacy became a British fast-food chain brand.
Modern intellectual property law is built on the concept of author — a specific person or legal entity that created something new. But culinary arts work differently: recipes are passed orally, mutate each generation, have no fixed version. When such a recipe enters industrial production, it's frozen — proportions standardized, packaged in plastic, trademark registered. A living process becomes a product.
The Riffel vs Nando's case isn't unique. In the 2010s, Mexican farmers tried to challenge American agribusiness patents on corn varieties that had been grown in Oaxaca for centuries. Indian tea producers protested Western brands registering names of traditional blends. Ethiopia fought for recognition of coffee from the Sidamo region as a geographical designation so European roasters couldn't use that name for arabica from Brazil.
Legal protection only works if a culture has organized lobbying and a budget for lawyers. Mozambique had neither. Riffel, as a private individual, could afford to threaten a lawsuit but not wage a multi-year battle. Nando's, with its turnover and legal staff, could drag out the process until the plaintiff went bankrupt. A confidential settlement is a compromise of exhaustion: both sides understand that a public trial will cost more than a silent deal.
But the question remains open: if tomorrow a Chinese corporation copies Nando's recipe (and they're already copying — in Shanghai there are chains with nearly identical menus), who will complain? Nando's can sue for trademark infringement, but not for theft of cultural heritage — because the company itself is the one that privatized that heritage. Mozambique can't demand compensation because the country has no legal right to a recipe created anonymously over centuries. Riffel already signed an NDA and is silent.
Peri-peri became a product without an author — a commodity that belongs to whoever first registered the brand and built the factory. In a sense this is fair: capitalism doesn't recognize historical claims, only current property rights. But this also makes any conversation about justice impossible. If flavor is no one's until someone invests money in its production, then culinary heritage automatically goes to those who have capital.
The sauce that began as a mixture of American pepper, Portuguese acid, and African sun ended its life as a plastic bottle on a Tesco shelf. Somewhere in Maputo a grandmother still makes her version — without scales, without timers, by eye. No one will give her a patent. No one will pay royalties. She just cooks, as her mother taught her, and her mother — her own mother, and so on three hundred years back. History is silent about such authors, because history is written by those who know how to register trademarks.