Food Content Meets Community-Style Commerce With a Side of Payments Innovation

In the misty years between 2008 and 2013 or so, as the mobile internet was bringing change to every part of our lives, it was a kind of Mesozoic business era, bridging old and new worlds.

Right around then, food journalist, author and CEO Amanda Hesser got the early idea for Food52, which started essentially as a cooking blog and is now a curated online marketplace with a $100 million valuation and a tasty formula for turning content into commerce.

In a conversation for the series “Digital Payments Flip the Script: 10 Merchants and 10 Visions for Digital Transformation,” a PYMNTS and PayPal collaboration, Hesser told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster that early on, “there was no cart or checkout. We had a shop with categories in a traditional eCommerce way. You could look up cookware, we had product pages, but if you wanted to buy a product, you had to click through to that source. We didn’t do affiliate because affiliate networks weren’t that evolved.”

The company built its platform to process payments at first as “there really wasn’t an existing platform that we could use that could create the kind of curated drop ship model that we have,” she said. Over time, it’s continually upgraded to improve the checkout experience.

However, Food52’s real strength was content, and that’s where the breakthrough happened. It started with an awareness that “when you start out as a commerce company, the way you measure and validate your success is so much based on transactions that it can be hard to invest in content unless it is resulting in a transaction.”

It didn’t take her long to realize that “you have to build trust with people, and you can build amazing trust through content. We needed to do that first and build loyalty before we could get people comfortable with the idea of using their credit card on our site to buy products.”

Deepening connections is a founding principle for the lifestyle brand, which is why Hesser said she prefers describing Food52 as a community rather than a marketplace. Doing this means being a business not obsessed with fast consumer decisions. It sounds counterintuitive; it’s the opposite.

“The thing about content and building relationship is that people don’t mind you recommending things or getting them excited to buy something,” she said. “But if that’s all you’re doing, it feels like the relationship is thin.”

Instead, building a sense of community and acting as a “broader resource in their lives … when they’re looking for inspiration, but also when they’re looking to figure out what sauté pan they should buy, creates the flow that starts with inspiration and trust, ending in conversions.”

See also: Creating Cookware for a Generation That Doesn’t Cook

Curation Revelation

Drilling down into market positioning that differentiates Food52 from competitors, Hesser said she believes we’re overwhelmed with choice when a friendly guide is what people want.

“I think of marketplaces as [sites] where vendors sign up and sell things,” she said. “We actually go out and seek the vendors we want to work with. We have a buying team, and that’s part of our curation. There might be 35 or more nonstick frying pans to choose from. We’re going to just show you three and tell you why we think these are the best.”

The pandemic was a test for the platform, and it responded in a community fashion.

“Some of our makers stopped what they were making and started producing masks, so we sold masks and hand sanitizer,” she said. “We responded to the moment and what people needed and cared about.”

It was a pivot with a point, as that “meet them where they are with what they need” mentality soon saw Food52 ideally positioned to leverage other more lucrative pandemic trends.

Seeing sales of outdoor home goods take off, she said, “We thankfully had anticipated it and planned for it a bit. Interestingly, there was a big rush on a lot of cookware in the early days of the pandemic, then there was a period where there wasn’t, and then it kind of came back again. We’re expecting it to continue shifting.”

With 60,000 recipes on the site and a few competing pandemic-era design trends to leverage, Hesser said she expects the Food52 community to be eating and decorating on multiple fronts in 2022.

In addition to the growth of outdoor entertaining and the return of travel, she noted, “People’s relationship with the office is changed forever.”

She said, “we’re not seeing it as this place that people are Monday to Friday.”

“People are changing the way they live in their homes because they now are permanently having workspaces,” she said. “What does that look like? People want those spaces to be a reflection of who they are. We’re making sure we’re responding to that through the products we offer.”

Read also: How Furniture Is Helping Build a Larger Retail Ecosystem

New Products, Old Favorites

Growing through a series of recent strategic acquisitions, including lighting and home hardware eCommerce site Schoolhouse and iconic Danish cookware brand Dansk, Food52 is planning more line extensions as the best pandemic nesting trends become a lifestyle.

Hesser told Webster that in addition to a line of dry goods coming this year, inspired by a booming business in this category over the pandemic, “One of the things I’m most excited and proud of is our Five.Two product line. We design the products in collaboration with our community from the ground up. We get feedback throughout the design process.”

No MBA needed to participate in the Five.Two Design Team, incidentally.

“It’s open ended,” she said. “Anyone can sign up who’s interested. They take part through surveys, we send them products to test … look at prototypes, talk about products they want and design details. It’s really unusual in the market having a line of products where the consumers have truly weighed in on what they want and had an impact on the resulting product.”

They like to keep it light, but real innovation comes from community feedback. Hesser described something “that we never would’ve thought of, but we think it’s brilliant” — a cutting board-carving board combo with deeper runoff troughs on the sides.

“They gave us valuable details that didn’t exist in a product on the market,” she said. “It seemed so obvious once we did it.”

Another is an apron with potholders sewn in. No more looking for potholders.

“What we’ve realized is that Five.Two is this really special product line,” she said. “We want to lean into it, so we’ve been doing a lot more product development. We’ll start releasing more products in the second half of the year.”

If you’re wondering about the favorite recipe of this former food journalist and now Food52 CEO, check out this Bolognese recipe. It’s Hesser’s go-to dish.