The pandemic brought a windfall for NYT Cooking, but it also raised questions in The New York Times about what will happen to the app’s popularity when foodies are no longer stuck at home and in their kitchens.
Three years later, the Times says Cooking has retained many of its new users and kept them coming back to the app more often, with subscribers using the Cooking app more than tripling over the past four years.
“What felt like a huge win overall really stuck with this audience,” said Emily Weinstein, who has been the Times’ food and cooking editor since 2021. She joined the Times in 2007 as a web producer. and later helped launch the Cooking app in 2014. “We all wondered what would happen when people didn’t stay at home obsessively baking sourdough bread. And that was nerve-wracking.’
Emily Weinstein.
Rachel Vanney via The New York Times
While many media companies have struggled recently, The New York Times is a big digital success story. Cooking is part of that story. The Cooking app, along with Games, The Athletic and Wirecutter, boosted the company’s subscription business by providing different entry points. The All Access bundled strategy also allows the Times to capitalize on growth in demand for different types of content depending on the time of year (such as the winter holidays, which are peak cooking times) or news cycles.
Retaining Cooking readers was no given, given that the Times had to convince people to pay when there was an abundance of free recipes online (a Cooking-only subscription costs $50 a year).
How did they do it?
First, Cooking editors doubled in video starting in 2018. Cooking and Food’s editorial team has doubled since the start of the pandemic (the Times didn’t share specific numbers). In addition to its daily newsletters, apps and social channels, Cooking also benefits from prominent promotion of its recipes on the Times homepage and in its recommendation widgets.
To continue the growth, Cooking editors will be releasing more recipes and videos this year than ever before. The plan is to produce up to 100 recipes per month, roughly a 40% increase over 2023; and double your choice of cooking demo videos to 100.
The Times isn’t coy about the potential it sees in cooking. Camila Velasquez, general manager of NYT Cooking, said she believes the Times has “just scratched the surface” of getting people to become consumers. “We’re so early on this journey, so if we think that really anyone can try this and learn it, then you can think of all of culinary America as a potential consumer.”
The notion that Cooking is a place for the everyday cook to find easy-to-make recipes is a shift from the previous message of helping people become better and more confident in the kitchen. To expand its audience, Cooking’s leaders believe it needs to appeal to a wider range of people and get them to use the app repeatedly. Cooking learned that newer users perceive the Times’ recipes as taking more time than they say. So part of the job is to redefine what it means when we call a recipe quick and easy and create, as Weinstein put it, “recipes that are legitimately quicker and really try to challenge us to say, ‘Okay, but does you really should lemon peels?'”
Video is central to this approach. Weinstein and her team are adopting a mindset prevalent on YouTube and especially TikTok, where food influencers can defy traditional assumptions about recipes by putting together quick and simple dishes that have non-specific measurements.
Social video is also a place where the Times can showcase its well-known personalities like Eric Kim and Melissa Clark. When feta pasta became popular on TikTok, Clark stepped in with her own version, upping the easy factor by making it in one pan.
“The challenge here is that there are people here who get a lot of their nutritional content, as well as all other types of content, through video,” Weinstein said. “And a lot of the videos that they’re using or posting or watching are a little bit faster and looser.” We are trying to show that we can do something at this level.”
“A news organization wrapped in a lifestyle”
Camila Velasquez.
Matthew Tom-Wolverton via The New York Times
Cooking’s success as a whole was not a foregone conclusion before it launched in 2014. There was internal resistance based on concerns that a stand-alone app could work and whether it was the best use of the paper’s resources, said Adam Nagorny, a longtime reporter and Times author of The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Oversight and the Transformation of Journalism. He faced further skepticism about adding paid subscriptions in 2017, six years after the Times erected a news paywall.
Today, the bulk of the Times’ more than 10 million subscribers are on the news product, but Times CEO Meredith Levien said non-news apps like Cooking are increasingly moving into the bundle. Exactly how, the Times doesn’t say; stopped breaking out data for individual apps. The last time it did so in 2022, the Times reported that Cooking had over 1 million subscribers, the same as The Athletic and Games. The Times said Cooking and Five Weeknight Dishes were the paper’s second most popular newsletters after The Morning, while Cooking in 2023 had about 110 million users, which it defined as logged-in users and non-logged-in visitors.
Insiders speak with approval and admiration of the cookout as one of the many levers that have helped the paper retain readers in slow news cycles — something that other big papers like The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have failed to do to the same degree. In the case of Cooking, they’re also quick to point out that it builds on the Times’ tradition of food content that meets journalistic standards.
“It doesn’t conflict with the brand at all,” said one insider.
“Sometimes you hear that The New York Times is a news organization wrapped in a lifestyle organization,” Nagorny said, repeating a variation of a joke that is often made internally. “I would say it doesn’t compromise the news report; brings more to him.’
Replicating Cooking’s success with Wirecutter and The Athletic may not be easy. Both were acquired rather than domesticated, like cooking and to some extent games. And some internally question whether they live up to the Times’ journalistic standards. The Wirecutter also raised some eyebrows when it expanded its essential gear and gadget recommendations to things like women’s fashion.
The Times has a lot of free competition
It hasn’t been smooth sailing for other major recipe stores in recent years. Condé Nast’s Bon Appétit recently hired its third editor-in-chief in as many years after dealing with criticism over its treatment of employees of color. Food52, which pioneered its recipe trading model, has gone through three rounds of layoffs.
That doesn’t mean the Times has the field to itself, though. There are still plenty of free, ad-supported recipe sites out there. Social media is rich with food influencers like Carla Lalli Music, who has 218,000 subscribers on YouTube; and Molly Baz with 125,000. There are also popular Substackers like Alison Roman and David Lebovitz with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
Cooking’s claim is that it’s worth the price, given its breadth—the Times has a previous catalog of 22,000 recipes—and reliability through repeated testing. Along with the recipes, the subscription also provides access to the trusty reader notes at the bottom of Cooking’s recipes, which are often helpful and speak to the community that has formed around Cooking. And the Times occasionally runs sales on Cooking, though it also wants people to subscribe to the entire “All-Access” package (standard price: $325 a year).
“I think we’re worth the price,” Weinstein said. “When you think about it, that’s the price of a cookbook. This is an expensive cookbook, so maybe two cookbooks. And I’m definitely not saying this is available to everyone. We think about accessibility a lot… We have user notes for each recipe that are rich in information. We feel really confident in our strategy.”
