Binging With Babish Expands Into Meal Kits, Podcasting, and Hospitality

Andrew Rea, the YouTube cooking creator known as Binging with Babish, is rolling out a cluster of new ventures that mark his most ambitious push yet to extend the channel into a broader media and consumer business.

On Wednesday, Rea announced a partnership with the meal-kit service CookUnity to sell a line of Babish-branded pre-made dishes, a venture that follows on the heels of two additional launches. In May, Babish debuted a podcast in partnership with Vox Media, called In the Booth with Babish, and earlier this spring, he opened Bed n Babish, a short-term rental compound along the Delaware River designed for traveling foodies.

The launches join an existing portfolio that includes several cookbooks, a cookware line carried in Walmart and Amazon, and Baked with Babish, a THC-infused sugar that is expanding its product line this fall.

Together, the announcements position Rea as the latest creator to convert a YouTube audience into the foundation for a diversified business. In doing so, he joins a growing cadre of such creators, including MrBeast and Jesser, who have branched out from the platform in hopes of turning their fame into a more durable enterprise.  

“Every YouTuber is a small business,” Rea said. “You are an LLC generating revenue and changing your business model depending on what’s trending.”

Rea, who hit 4 million YouTube subscribers earlier this year, quit his job in post-production within six months of starting the channel in 2016. He has since brought on his longtime friend Sawyer Jacobs to run the company as CEO, and the operation employs four full-time staff, including two editors. The cookware brand Made In invested $3 million in the business to fund native content for the channel, Rea said.

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CookUnity, a longtime advertising partner of the channel, will begin selling four Babish-designed dishes in the New York tri-state area, with expansion to Chicago and Los Angeles planned in the coming months. Rea developed each recipe himself and worked with the company’s test kitchens to make them scalable. The eventual lineup will rotate between 10 mainstays and five seasonal items.

The partnership is a natural extension for a culinary creator whose audiences routinely watch him prepare dishes that they, up until now, have been unable to eat themselves. Additionally, many of his recipes, such as his pot roast and fried chicken, are too involved for most home cooks to replicate, making them a prime candidate for a meal-delivery option.

Babish declined to offer financial specifics of the deal, except to say that he is paid per each meal sold.

The podcast, which premiered May 25 and runs every other week, is a long-form interview show in which guests including William H. Macy and Alton Brown discuss their relationships with food. 

Vox provides back-end support while Rea retains creative control, he said. The first season is set for 26 episodes. The break-up of Vox Media, which was recently sold in two tranches to Lupa Systems and Penske Media Company, did not affect Rea’s decision to partner with the company, he added.

Rea, who attended film school and spent seven years in post-production before launching the channel, said the broader expansion is rooted in a creative ambition that predates YouTube. 

He pointed to the trajectory of creators like Kane Parsons, the Backrooms filmmaker now developing the project with A24, as a model for what comes next. A short film Rea has been writing for a decade, a thriller about an entity that wakes up in a different person each day, goes into production this summer.

“I’ve divorced myself from the business side of things so I could focus on the creative,” Rea said. “I don’t have that Martha Stewart gene in me.”