Expanding NYT Cooking’s audience.

Partnered with the editorial and product teams to conduct research and develop a strategy to attract younger, racially/ethnically diverse audience to New York Times Cooking.

Role
Project and research lead

Timeline
Nov 2021 - Feb 2022

Project Type
Discovery, product and content strategy

Background

Launched in 2016, NYT Cooking is a food and cooking subscription from the New York Times.

Subscribers have access to a mobile app and website where they can search and save thousands of recipes from The New York Times.

The Cooking editorial team also regularly publishes new recipes on and off-platform (e.g., Instagram, email).

Role

As the research lead for NYT Cooking, I was responsible for identifying knowledge gaps and gathering insights about our current and prospective audience.

I also partnered with product, editorial and marketing to deploy learnings to help us better meet the needs of our current audience and sustainably grow our subscription business.

The problem.

Cooking has roughly 1 million subscribers in the U.S. — but the demographic make-up of these subscribers suggests our product resonates most strongly with an older, whiter audience.

In order to fulfill our mission to reach everyone with our journalism and meet subscriber growth goals, we need to broaden the appeal of Cooking to meet the needs of a younger (under 40) and more racially/ethnically diverse audience.

Our questions.

  1. What do younger (under 40) and non-white home cooks need from cooking sources?

  2. What cooking sources do they turn to and why?

  3. What about NYT Cooking does or does not resonate with them?

  4. How might we better reach these audiences?

Survey Analysis

Prospective and current audience of U.S. home cooks who use digital cooking/recipe sources (N = 2284).

Literature Review

Academic and in-house research on the food, cooking and digital media needs of younger, racially/ethnically diverse audiences.

Interviews

16 90 minute IDIs with our prospective Cooking audience (Home cooks under 40, 12 of whom identify as non-white).

Initial learnings led us to revise our hypotheses and approach.

  • In analyzing the survey data, I found that home cooks under 40 — regardless of race or ethnicity — have the same top drivers for picking for a recipe source.

  • At first, this insight was confounding (and frankly, frustrating). If needs are the same across these demographics, when why aren’t we attracting more non-white home cooks?

  • However, digging more deeply into the literature led me to believe that our understanding of top drivers was missing an important and difficult to detect factor: signals of belonging.

  • Because previous research indicated that the signals that convey belonging to people are subtle, complex and culturally shaped, we’d need a more nuanced and qualitative approach to learning what aspects of recipe sources resonate with our prospective audience.

"Adri is so patient and thoughtful. She helped me highlight my work in a way that makes me so proud of my unique approach to design."

— Collette Noll