Deborah Wehrens is the founder and Managing Director of Culius, the world's first private culinary intellectual property brokerage. Dutch-born and based in Tongeren-Borgloon, Belgium, she spent thirty years as a professional chef before a career change led her to build the company from scratch.

Long before she ever stood in a kitchen, Deborah wanted to be a writer. That ambition never quite went anywhere at the time, life took her into cooking instead, but it found its way back to her decades later, in the middle of building Culius, when she finally had both the reason and the material to put it into words.

That combination, thirty years of hands-on culinary experience paired with a genuine instinct for writing, shapes everything she builds. Culius applies real, independent rigor to valuing and protecting culinary work, developed from someone who has actually lived the creation process, not a financial background looking at food as an unfamiliar new market. Her first book, The Last Unprotected Craft, makes the broader case for why cooking, of all the creative fields, has never had a real system for protecting the people who practice it.

Deborah manages every Culius engagement personally, works with chefs and food creators worldwide, and remains based in Belgium, where she built her professional life and where Culius is headquartered.