The New York Times is ordering up an expanded slate of cooking content. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Times is planning to launch several food-centric video shows in the coming months, including an adaptation of Tanya Sichynsky‘s newsletter The Veggie and a baking series hosted by Vaughn Vreeland (pictured above).
The new slate of foodie content kicked off on June 27 with the launch of Cooking 101, a didactic program helmed by a rotating cast of hosts. The video version of The Veggie will arrive next month, and Vreeland’s contribution will premiere later this year.
The idea behind this production push is to capitalize on NYT Cooking’s growing subscriber base. The Times clocked 456 million visits on its cooking hub last year, and the NYT Cooking YouTube channel has surged past one million subscribers.
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To get a greater understanding of the NYT Cooking video push, we have to travel back to 2020, when internal strife caused a stir at the culinary publication Bon Appetit. With its “Test Kitchen” videos, Bon Appetit had become one of the biggest food publishers on social media, but in the wake of widespread drama — some of which was reported by The New York Times — many of the personalities who made the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen famous chose to move on.
As a result, the food content industry became flooded with free agents who offered both elite culinary chops and YouTube-ready on-camera skills. The Grey Lady quickly capitalized on that opportunity by hiring Sohla El-Waylly and Claire Saffitz, two of the most recognizable Bon Appetit Test Kitchen alumnae. At the time of this post, the most-watched long-form video on the NYT Cooking YouTube channel is Saffitz’s tutorial for “perfect croissants.”
The Times didn’t just cull from Bon Appetit. Sichynsky got newsletter experience at The Washington Post before joining the Gray Lady in 2020. Vreeland’s previous work includes a stint as a producer and creator for Tasty, BuzzFeed’s digital food brand. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is another Times contributor; the venerated food scientist also operates a popular YouTube channel of his own.
Add up all that experience, and you get a kitchen staff that is ready for its collective close-up. “We really do want to be the home of the best food talent on the internet,” NYT Cooking Editorial Lead Emily Weinstein told THR. “Video is, of course, the lingua franca of the internet, it’s just a natural way forward for us.”
Could these videos pave the way for a multimedia empire of delicious dishes? Some of the chefs involved in the New York Times content operation have already hosted shows on major streaming platforms. Now, they’ll join forces with their employer as it looks to become a next-generation Food Network.
