How Amanda Hesser cooked up success with Food52
From chef to baker to New York Times journalist, the Food52 co-founder followed her gut and turned a lifelong passion into a multimillion-dollar business
It was a real treat to interview Food52 CEO and co-founder Amanda Hesser, who’s an old friend going back to my early days in the New York startup community. Listening to her tell the story of her entrepreneurial journey, you get the sense that she’s lived many lives — from studying food history alongside classmates like Corby Kummer and Sheryl Julian to apprenticing in a bakery in Germany (where she was the only woman in the kitchen) to sharpening her cooking and writing skills at a Chateau in Burgundy and ultimately landing at The New York Times, where she served as food editor of The New York Times Magazine. One common theme that emerges from all of these experiences is Amanda’s all-in approach. She follows her gut, immerses herself in the adventure and soaks up everything she can from it. You can also see how all of those lives became part of the DNA of Food52. Although Amanda told me they’ve often felt out of sync with what’s popular or cool at the moment, the truth is, they’ve always been ahead of the trends. Since its launch in 2010 as a place for people to talk about food and share recipes, Food52 has grown to 100 employees, won a prestigious James Beard Award for Publication of the Year and launched a thriving online shop, including its own line of products. In 2019, TCG Capital Management, an affiliate of The Chernin Group, acquired a majority stake in the company for $83 million. As one of the few women in the New York startup scene back when I first met her, today Amanda is a role model for a new generation of entrepreneurs. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast and Spotify. If you love it, please help more people find it by leaving a review!
“I sort of follow my gut, generally. And it was telling me to just pursue this, and to kind of immerse myself, learn as much as I could.”
For someone who’s gone on to become a celebrated food writer and cookbook author, it’s fitting that Amanda Hesser’s first foray into the food business started with a letter. As she shares in this episode, while she was in college, she wrote to the chef at her favorite restaurant asking if she could work for free and learn the ropes. Her passion for food led her on a journey through restaurants and bakeries and food history courses, where she had her first inkling that “you can have a job where you just write about food and you interview people and, you know, you report on food.” After graduation, she landed a scholarship to work in a bakery in Germany, where she would be the only woman among the 30 or so bakers. Living in a small apartment above the bakery, her pre-dawn wake-up call came in the form of the rumbling of ovens heating up below.
“I think I started having that sort of urge to write, because I felt like I had stories to tell, but I had never written really anything other than papers.”
After stints in more kitchens across Europe, Amanda enrolled in a cooking school in France. As luck would have it, the owner of the school wrote cookbooks, and Amanda got the chance to work as her assistant. “It was like my work-study program,” she says. The experience would not only introduce her to the ins and outs of cookbook writing, but it would also deepen her interest in food culture and the stories behind the food we cook and the people who grow it. Amanda shares how that led her to conceptualize, pitch and write her first book, “The Cook and the Gardener,” a collection of recipes and essays about Monsieur Milbert, the gardener at the Chateau du Fey in Burgundy.
“Four days before I moved, I got a phone call from The New York Times, out of the blue, and it was an editor who left a message saying, we’d love to talk to you.”
With my business Muck Rack, which is all about journalism and helping companies find the right journalist to pitch, I was particularly interested to hear about Amanda’s experience at The New York Times and how her time was there. Working for an institution like the Times, with its ingrained culture and politics, could be challenging for someone who wanted to experiment and play around with different ideas, she says. Like most people with an entrepreneurial bent, she wanted to be able to just dive in and do things. At the same time, though, she had the opportunity to be surrounded by smart, interesting people — including a lot of smart, interesting women who were running big departments. When she finally made the decision to take a buyout and try her hand at her own business, she says she felt like a bit of an outsider in the startup community, which was dominated mostly by men in their early twenties.
“I call it my startup grad school year.”
Food52 wasn’t Amanda’s first startup. After a year spent trying to build a proof of concept around the original idea, though, she and her co-founders realized it was simply too big for them to tackle. It was disappointing, but in the process, she came into her own as a founder. At the Founders Roundtable, which is where she and I met, she says she found “my people,” others like her who had a drive to create new things and take risks. “I think that that is what kind of kept me going,” she says. And while she’d invested her own time and money in that first concept, she didn’t lose money for anyone else. Along the way, she learned more, immersed herself into the startup community and made important connections. She was also finishing up a book and continued to write a column for The New York Times, both of which she says kept her afloat, financially as well as psychologically.
By the time the idea for Food52 came about, Amanda not only had that first experience under her belt, she also had something else that would give her even more confidence to move forward: domain experience. Food was something she knew, and she could see that big changes were happening in the food world and in food media that other companies weren’t responding to.
“We had, you know, a lot of people interested, and kind of like no one willing to write the first check.”
Amanda notes that the shifting winds of venture capital can be tough to keep up with, and she admits that they’ve never really been in sync with those winds. Food and media weren’t hot with investors at the time. But just over a year after launch, in October of 2010, they finally closed their first seed round for $750,000.
An interesting aspect of Food52 is that it’s not just an online media site; it’s also a retail site. And as Amanda explains, that wasn’t an afterthought. Commerce was part of the vision from the very beginning. The site launched in September of 2009, and the shop launched that December. A few years later, they raised series A funding to build a commerce platform. It seems like a broad vision, but Amanda sees it all as interconnected, especially in response to what was then a very fragmented consumer experience. “This is what we wanted as customers,” she says. “One place that is curating the world of food and giving us everything we need.”
“Having that sort of pressure off of my shoulders…in many ways has allowed me to really focus more like 100% on the future of the company, and I feel really excited about that.”
After nearly ten years in business, Food52 hit another big milestone when TCG Capital Management acquired a majority stake in the company for $83 million. Amanda reflects on how that decision helped simplify things at just the right time in the company’s evolution. With the investors paid off and the connections she’s making with other founders through TCG, she says she feels more energized than ever. And as someone who’s lived so many lives in so many far-flung locations, she now has all the adventure she needs right in New York City. “The beauty of a startup,” she points out, “is that nothing is ever boring.”
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