Likewise, a similar move into the dining space is coming from financial service providers.
American Express bought Resy in 2019, JPMorgan Chase acquired The Infatuation in 2021, and in February, Bilt hired the CEO of the Jose Andres Group, Sam Bakhshandehpour, as its new president of local merchants, the latest indicator of the growing overlap between credit cards, rewards programs, and dining culture.
The increased involvement of these deep-pocketed investors in the food industry has invigorated the food media sector.
The sea change makes Eater, which now specializes in getting diners into restaurants, a plausible bolt-on for a food technology player looking for a top-of-funnel discovery mechanism.
It bears mentioning that the founder of Eater, Ben Leventhal, is also the founder of Resy, which in 2024 undertook an initiative aimed at expanding its editorial offering. So if building proves a burden, perhaps they would consider buying?
Tasty, on the other hand, has a very different value proposition. The food media brand has a strong licensing and merchandise business—so much so that I reported on it in 2021, when it crossed $250 million in global sales.
Rather than a bolt-on for a food delivery app then, Tasty might make a more appealing acquisition for a retail partner, such as Walmart or Amazon, both of whom it has worked with in years past—or perhaps even Target, according to a person familiar with the business. Its desirability as an entertainment brand may not be what it once was, but its name-brand familiarity and track record of retail relationships could help ensure it finds its forever home.
Wherever Eater and Tasty end up, investor interest in the brands and other media titles reflects the unique intersection at which food media has found itself.
As I have written before, food media will remain relevant so long as people need to feed themselves, a behavior that cultivates the kind of daily habit that media executives dream of.
New outlets like Caper and Gourmet are betting on continued consumer interest in the dining space, a gamble they are making alongside some of the most well-heeled technology and financial service firms in the country.
Its stubbornly corporeal nature—the fact that eating will always be an in-person experience—also aligns well with the transformation of the media industry into an experiential industry with a media wrapper. Events from food publishers, like the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Complex’s Family Style, and The Infatuation’s EEEEEATSCON, have all proven to be durable, profitable extensions of their brands.
These factors, when combined, make the space ripe for both dealmaking and innovation, a sure sign that the most interesting days of food media are far from behind us.
Talking Heds
More Bot Than Not (SCOOP): The media brand Time now receives more website traffic from bots than humans, its chief executive officer Jess Sibley told a crowd of media executives at the Revved Up Conference last week, according to an audio recording obtained by ADWEEK. While a startling admission, the reality is that analysts estimate that roughly half of all internet traffic now comes from bots, although the exact percentages vary largely depending on the website type. To its credit, Time is farther along than most when it comes to monetizing those crawlers, thanks to its partnerships with firms like TollBit and ScalePost, according to a spokesperson.
