Food bloggers: Sonja Bakker steals our recipes
Sonja Bakker’s account was removed from Instagram because she regularly posted recipes she had not come up with herself, but had copied from other food bloggers. Sometimes only the recipe was the same; sometimes even the photo bore a striking resemblance. One food blogger hired a lawyer, but other bloggers also complained about the copied recipes.
Sonja Bakker earned stacks of money from her diet books, which she self-published. Through her Sonja Bakker Method, sales of eierkoeken and Liga bars skyrocketed, and people lost kilos by following her guidelines. Despite the fact that Sonja is not a dietitian and that her method receives a great deal of criticism from, among others, the Nutrition Centre, her books turned her into a household name across the Netherlands.
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The accusations will probably sound familiar to Sonja, because at the beginning of her career she was also accused of plagiarism. A colleague who took the LOI course to become a weight consultant at the same time as Sonja said that Sonja had copied her book ‘Reach Your Ideal Weight’ from her book ‘Losing Weight and Personal Growth’. Despite the passages being exactly the same, the judge ruled that there was no plagiarism.
‘Heartbreaking’
Now she has an army of foodies on her case who saw their own recipes and photo ideas reappear on Sonja’s Instagram account and Facebook page. Silvia Ribas Dunnirvine hired a lawyer to stop the plagiarism, and thousands of people reported plagiarism. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Silvia tells RTL Boulevard. ‘She hadn’t stolen just one recipe, but several. She even shared one of them three times. It takes us so much work to create them, and then for someone to pretend they’re hers is heartbreaking.’
Insta goes dark
The Instagram account is now offline, while Facebook is still considering what to do with the diet guru. In the meantime, the stolen content has been removed from Facebook. Sonja says she is very sorry about what happened. The recipes are not posted by Sonja herself, but by a team of employees. ‘I’m now consulting with those people to see whether something went wrong,’ she tells Beaumonde.
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Source: Beaumonde.nl, Nu.nl
