How Food52 Super-Charged Its Culinary Community
8 community-building lessons from the food media juggernaut’s co-founder Amanda Hesser
It’s not often you get to talk with one of your media idols, but on last week’s Download I got to talk with one of mine: Amanda Hesser, former New York Times food editor and co-founder and CEO of food media juggernaut Food52.
In the 11 years since Food52’s inception, the company has grown from a startup to one of the fastest growing companies in America, drawing 24-million people across multiple channels, from Web to video to social to books to podcasts, and beyond. The brand has expanded to covering all things Home and launched its own line of products. A podcast network is coming this fall and there are plans for events and brick-and-mortar if and when in-person life resumes.
One major ingredient in the brand’s success? Its genuine passion community—something that has been central to its strategy from the get-go (spoiler alert: while the digital landscape may have changed dramatically since 2009, many of the strategies that drove its phenomenal growth remain highly relevant today). Here are 8 takeaways from our conversation you can use to super-charge your own community.
1. Put your community first
Paging doctor obvious, right? Actually, this one isn’t as easy as you’d think. In conceiving Food52, Amanda and co-founder Merrill Stubbs bet on a cultural shift that was taking place at the time in which food was no longer just about what you ate for dinner, but touched every aspect of your life, from where you shopped and vacationed to how you socialized, designed your home and more.
The pair saw food as being “at the center of a life well-lived” and believed that a large community shared their view—something that the exploding universe of food blogs leant credence to at the time.
But rather than simply creating a space that brought people together and provided them with content as countless food blogs were doing, they set out to create one with “a sense of place” that would serve as a comprehensive resource for anybody who cared about kitchen and home: “We understood that community had to be at the forefront and we really started thinking about our community and how putting your audience first is everything.”
2. Community can be messy, but coheres through shared sensibility and values
Food52 has spawned countless micro-communities (ahem, calling all charcuterie fanatics). While Amanda acknowledges that “community is messy”— indeed, theirs has lots of “fragments and overlaps” within it and “people do different things in different ways on different channels”—the through-line is shared sensibility and values. Meaning: wherever the community is, it feels “all of one piece.” She explains: “If you always think of community as a place where people with shared values congregate, then micro-communities will grow organically and you can help guide their development. You don’t know what’s going to evolve, but to us, that felt like a very natural thing to just let happen.” In other words: build something great, then let go and allow your community run with it.
3. Don’t cave to pressure to build a community on a platform that isn’t right for you
When Food52 launched in 2009, the content landscape looked a tad different than it does today (Facebook and Twitter were just beginning to blow up for brands, and Instagram didn’t even exist yet—its arrival was still a year away). Like most founders, Amanda and Merrill had limited resources when they launched. So they had to decide which platforms to prioritize—a business practice they follow to this day. The rubber hit the road when Snapchat exploded onto the scene, and they got serious pressure to build a presence there. But, says Amanda: “it didn’t feel like Snapchat was a good fit for our brand.” Another reason it didn’t feel right: by that point they were already getting traction on Instagram, and couldn’t afford to invest in both platforms without “minimizing what we were doing” on Instagram.
While Amanda acknowledges they’ve made some missteps (“I think we missed the boat on Pinterest”), she thinks that discipline and insistence on setting boundaries has really paid off. Just because a certain platform is getting traction, “we’re definitely not going to cave to pressure [if] we don’t think it’s right for us.” So what about TikTok? Says Amanda:“I do think there’s a place for us on that platform. We’re experimenting with it.”
4. Prioritize content that sparks interactions between community members
If you really want to build a community, says Amanda,“You have to be super creative and nimble and constantly iterate.” One early example of this was Food52’s crowdsourced cookbook. The concept: run recipe contests every week with a goal to creating a cookbook together with the fledgling Food52 community in 52 weeks.
“Community involvement wasn’t just adding recipes. It was voting on recipes, commenting on recipes. We felt like every interaction mattered. It allowed people to come in at whatever level of engagement and expertise they wanted.” Beyond this, the contest achieved multiple goals: it helped build out a recipe database methodically, discover talented cooks in their midst, give non-professionals an opportunity to get their work into a book by a major publishing house, and gave the co-founders the chance to prove whether their vision of building a community through constructive contributions had legs.
5. Create mechanisms to let your audience tell you what they want—then build on what they tell you
When Amanda and Merrill set out to create their own line of cooking and home products that eventually became Five Two, they sent a survey to their followers via email and social at the start of the development process asking what features people wanted in an ideal cutting board. The response was overwhelming: over 10,000 people weighed in, with over half filling out the open field question (“What did we miss?”) with their own thoughts. The founders knew they were onto something.
That experiment taught them there was not only a market of people primed to purchase their products, but also a group who wanted to give feedback on them even before they were complete.
This second group gave rise to its own sub-community: the Five Two Design Team, now 25,000 members strong, who share thoughts on product development, test prototypes, and more. “We’re listening to people and creating a sub-community based on what we hear. It’s about being inclusive and really listening.”
6. Personal is scalable. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
From the start, Amanda and Merrill believed that people crave personal interactions, especially when it comes to subjects as intimate and emotional as food and home. They intrinsically knew that, in order to become a powerhouse brand, people had to grow to trust them—which required having a 1-1 relationship with them.
But when Food52 launched in 2009, investors didn’t feel the same— personal just wasn’t scalable, they insisted.
So Amanda and Merrill set out to prove them wrong.
The pair observed that when someone asked a question in their comments section about recipes and articles, others leapt in to answer it. There were a lot of people with knowledge to share, they realized.
Enter the Food52 hotline, where members could ask any question and either they or someone in the community would answer. The hotline empowered community members to be foot soldiers for the brand—the very definition of scalable.
Today, says Amanda, the Hotline “just chugs along like a self-cleaning oven.” She hops on it a couple of times a week and Food52 writers and contributors are expected to answer every question. Why? If somebody has taken the time to make their recipe or read their article, “we want them to know they’ve been heard.”
7. Helping your community members grow will help you grow, too
If a community member has a success story, the Food52 team considers it an extension of their own success. Case in point: Many community members and recipe contributors have gone on to write books and land jobs at food media companies—like Food52’s first hire, founding Editor and Creative Director Kristen Miglore, who turned her wildly popular Genius Recipes column into a bestselling cookbook and popular video series and is about to launch a podcast.
Drawing on this logic, Amanda and Merrill recently developed a residency program to bring in people around specific topics such as bread, pasta and spirits. The idea was to bring creators on board who already had followings, could focus on what they loved to do and do more of it, and create a connection with others who “maybe are looking down into the rabbit hole” of a particular food sub-interest, but haven’t gone into it yet.
Their approach is completely different in energy and tone from that of a typical brand, in that for them, it’s not just about an exchange of money. “It’s very important to us that any partnership we undertake is mutually beneficial. We want them to feel excited to be introducing their families to us.”
8. A diverse audience may not be great for ad sales, but it’s great for business long-term
When Food52 launched, it’s audience was primarily older (45+) but as its social presence grew, its younger audience grew as well. Today, it consists largely of two major groups—one older (45-60) and the other solidly millennial. “Of course, that’s a disaster for ad sales,” she says, because advertisers want to target one specific audience. But if you’re thinking about your business in the long-term I love it, because we can serve people really well in many different ways. If we can be with you and serving you differently but usefully at each of the different stages of your life, and build that relationship in a lasting way, to me that’s success.”
Want to hear more from Amanda Hesser? Check out our full hour-long conversation on The Digital Campfire Download here.
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