Tastemade Cooks Up a Recipe App to Engage Its 100,000 Subscribers

The independent food publisher Tastemade launched its first recipe app, Tastemade Cooking, in mid-November to deepen engagement among Tastemade+ subscribers and capitalize on the culinary fervor surrounding Thanksgiving.

The app is technically the second in the Tastemade universe—the first, called Tastemade, is designed for streaming Tastemade video—and it aims to add value to a Tastemade+ subscription, which costs $5.99 per month or $49.99 annually.

Since its relaunch in 2023, Tastemade+ has racked up more than 100,000 paying subscribers, according to Evan Bregman, its general manager of streaming and direct-to-consumer. The publisher points to its product-market fit and series of strategic partnerships as key to its rapid growth.

With the new app, these subscribers can now sift through a library of more than 12,000 Tastemade recipes, all of which have an accompanying video.

The decision to launch the recipe app came as a result of two factors. First, Tastemade consumers had been clamoring for one. Previously, at-home cooks could only access Tastemade recipes through the web.

But the company also noticed a strong connection between its membership and its recipes. According to Bregman, the No. 1 way to drive viewers from its free, ad-supported television channels back to the app was an on-screen call to action encouraging the viewer to cook the recipe they had just watched.

“Tastemade+ was serving our members in a way that we weren’t geared for yet,” Bregman said. “The product was oriented mostly around video, but we know a mobile app drives more engagement than a mobile website. We wanted people to be able to watch us for free and then extend their experience.”

The release of Tastemade Cooking is the latest in a series of product launches from publishers that aim to act as utilities for their audiences. In recent months, Outside Interactive acquired the MapMyFitness family of apps, Apartment Therapy redesigned its website to help home renovators, and Eater debuted a restaurant-finding app. 

The pivot toward utility reflects the growing challenge of acquiring customers as traffic referrals from search and social continue to dwindle. Publishers are increasingly looking to maximize the value of individual visitors by deepening their on-site engagement, and building them useful tools can be an effective way of doing so.

Inside Tastemade Cooking

The newly released Tastemade Cooking app has several points of appeal.

First, every recipe comes with an accompanying video, which can be helpful for recipes that involve a specific technique. 

The app also has a virtual recipe box and the ability to create a consolidated grocery list for easy shopping. To make the recipes more accessible, the app also has features that convert imperial to metric units (and vice versa), servings to scale, nutritional information, and other helpful capabilities.

The library of recipes also features dishes created by food media personalities and Tastemade cooks, including Andrew Zimmern, Kristen Kish, Dale Talde, and Frankie Celenza. 

From a subscription perspective, the app will serve as another funnel for converting video viewers into Tastemade+ subscribers. 

Made for TV

Tastemade reaches consumers across a variety of distribution points, including streaming, FAST channels, YouTube, its app, and several MVPDs. With the exception of its FAST distribution points, which are free and monetized with ads, almost all of these distribution points require some kind of consumer payment. 

On YouTube, for instance, audiences can only watch trailers and teasers of Tastemade videos. To access full videos, they would have to subscribe to YouTube TV or pay $2.99 per month, according to Bregman.

The introduction of the app further provides Tastemade with a conversion pathway for its FAST viewers, who make up the bulk of its audience: 70% of Tastemade’s monthly viewership happens on streaming channels. 

Using Tastemade Cooking, the publisher can now funnel its free FAST viewers toward a paid product. And for existing Tastemade+ subscribers, the Cooking app acts as an entirely new ecosystem for deepening their relationship with the publisher and its content. 

The publisher still makes the bulk of its revenue through advertising, which includes custom content studio partnerships with brands like Kraft Heinz. It also signed a first-look deal with Amazon in January, which will see Tastemade produce 15 unscripted lifestyle shows that will air on Prime Video.

But like other publishers, Tastemade hopes to continue diversifying its business to be less reliant on advertising and more in step with its paying viewership. 

“Tastemade+ has had a great year,” Bregman said. “We’ve forged a lot of really good partnerships that speak to the value proposition of not only our recipes but also our high-end series. The membership itself has been really attractive.”