Immediate Media’s Good Food had its biggest year ever commercially in 2024 after dropping its BBC branding and is looking to build on it with the launch of a large new test kitchen and filming space.
Commercial director Simon Carrington told Press Gazette the test kitchen will be a “big part” of Good Food’s future and its arrival could be the “biggest moment” so far in the brand’s 35-history.
He said the much bigger physical space for testing recipes and filming video content, which will lead to the creation of more personality-led content, will be a “focal point” for the business this year.
Content director Lily Barclay said Good Food has a “faces and voices strategy” which is putting staff in front of the camera more and “growing the profiles of each of our individual contributors”.
This is an evolution from the previously popular “hands and pans” style of food videos (although these do continue to work better on the Good Food website than on social media).
Barclay said this would lead to “deepening that relationship with our audience because they’re getting to know us as real people as opposed to just a brand”.
She added that from creating recipes to product testing and endorsements, “so much work goes into doing everything so thoroughly that what we want to do is shout about that more and show the audience that all of that work is happening and bring them along on the journey”.
Barclay described video as one area of future-proofing for Good Food, along with creating content that people will subscribe for and making the most of Apple News: “building the brand up on more platforms, so that in the future people are coming to us because of who we are as opposed to us just being first in Google”.
Previously Good Food had one small kitchen space in Immediate Media’s West London headquarters but much of its content was shot in studios across the city or in other rooms in the building. During the months-long construction period staff filmed batches of video content on intense days in a studio or at home, as they had done during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The new kitchen features five workstations designed with fixed camera and lighting set-ups around them as well as more flexible social video stations. Staff make use of domestic appliances wherever possible to emulate what the audience would be doing at home (commercial grade extraction fans are the exception) and there is a pantry, walk-in fridge and large washing up area.
It launched about halfway through January and the team still made more than 40 videos that month. Good Food also develops about 50 new recipes a month.
The aim is that the kitchen becomes recognised by the Good Food audience and is part of the brand personality itself.
Barclay said: “Part of it is inviting the audience into the Good Food kitchen… and it’s giving our content team a platform to really create more content than ever and higher quality content than ever and share the full experience of the Good Food brand.”
Carrington added: “It allows the personalities to to have a home, and I suppose the plan is for the kitchen to have a personality of its own… It’s all about trust. So if they can see us every day creating content with the recipes and the step by step guides, then it’s part of the same vision to show trusted content.”
A smaller studio next door (where the old kitchen was) can also be used for filming and is more of a blank slate for commercial partners to tweak.
The main kitchen also features a large table in the corner where people (internal staff or commercial partners) can gather and work whether filming is going on or not – the buzz can add to the atmosphere of a video, head of food Cassie Best told Press Gazette on a tour of the facility.
“In the old kitchen we felt quite detached from the rest of the office, and now it feels so open,” Best said, referring to the glass frontage of the kitchen onto the rows of desks nearby.
She added: “It’s just really nice to feel like we’re all part of one team, rather than the food team working away in the kitchen and no one else really knowing what’s going on. So I think that’s made a massive difference, and it feels very collaborative.”
Non-BBC Good Food: ‘We have more commercial freedom’
The kitchen launch comes almost a year after Good Food dropped its BBC branding, which had been under licence since Immediate Media acquired the brand in 2018. (Immediate was previously publishing the brand under contract while it was owned by the BBC’s commercial arm, BBC Studios.)
This has opened up more commercial opportunities for the brand. For example it launched Good Food’s first-ever product endorsement with dishwasher tablets Finish in August and has put commercial partnerships with the likes of Mars on the front cover of the magazine.
Carrington said: “We have more commercial freedom, but we have the same editorial standards. the value that the BBC brings to a brand is astonishing, and it would be foolish of us to ignore that heritage that we have.”
The main Good Food recipes app (it also has a separate magazine digital editions app) was sponsored for the first time by Lidl at Christmas. At the time of writing there is a line stating “sponsored by M&Ms” directly under the Good Food branding at the top of the app and “Easter with M&Ms” as the first subcategory on the homepage.
The app was previously ad free but Carrington said although it is not anymore, “we’re cautious about it… It is premium partnerships within there, and we’re very, very cautious of how and when those deals run, and then they’ll be content based as well.”
Barclay said the commercial content is “added value for users. So it’s native recipes, content that we know that they want, which is created by the same in-house team.”
Upskilling staff ‘part of future-proofing’
Good Food’s core revenue stream is still advertising but the app is part of a growing digital subscriptions strategy. The brand now has twice as many paying subscribers in digital as print with more than 250,000 in total – the most it has had in its history. Digital subscriptions overtook print overall at Immediate Media in early 2024.
The recipes app makes up more than 180,000 of the total Good Food subscribers. Good Food runs a premium content strategy, meaning app subscribers get exclusive recipes, meal plans and podcasts and other functionality but all users can get a large amount of recipe content. Subscriptions currently cost £24.99 per year (after a trial period of 99p for three months) or £4.49 per month.
Meanwhile print subscriptions were 105,570 on average in 2024, according to ABC.
Carrington said: “So while advertising is a fundamental part of our business, a lot of focus is on creating products and content that drives subscriptions.”
The magazine’s total circulation was 133,900, of which 84% was in print. It had a website reach of 12.7 million people in January.
In common with many magazines, Good Food gets a sizeable proportion of its paid ABC-audited digital circulation from all-you-can-read bundle subscriptions like Apple News+ and Readly (17,961 of a total digital magazine circulation of 20,794).
Barclay revealed Good Food creates some content specifically for Apple News (though it is likely to be reused elsewhere afterwards) and that about three to five articles each month drive the majority of traffic on the platform.
Immediate Media’s food team has 42 members of staff working across Good Food and sister title Olive. Good Food focuses on mass market content (with about 10% of page views going to health content each month, an area that will see further investment this year) while Olive is a more premium title focused on entertaining at home and travel.
Barclay said Immediate is “really passionate about is investing in the people. That’s our protection for the future, really: investing in those people, making sure that they’re upskilled, that they are future-proofed, and that we’re creating the best possible content that is really meeting our audience’s needs and that that’s been put onto every single platform”.
Although citing Google’s AI Overviews (which give people more information in response to a query without them having to click through to a website) as an “obvious challenge”, Barclay also noted AI is an opportunity for helping with “the more laborious tasks that the editorial team have to deal with, so that we can concentrate on creating really strong, original content, which AI can’t do”.
For example, she said an internal AI tool will now provide staff writing an article about the top carrot recipes with a shortlist from the archive, although nothing is directly generated by AI for publication.
“We are asking our teams to spend much more time on more time-consuming content outputs as well: video for sure takes longer to produce than a listicle article, so we have to speed up those processes for them in able to let them concentrate on the future proofing.”
Sustainability was also a repeated theme: it’s a key focus in the kitchen across recycling, stock control, food waste as well as in the construction itself (with cabinets from the old kitchen reused elsewhere in the building).
But Barclay said it can also be related to the content itself: “In terms of our sustainability credentials, we look at that for content as well. So once we’ve created something, we think about how many times can we use it?”
Carrington added: “The plan is all our content is 360 but some is tailored and tweaked for specific platforms but ultimately it should run across all with a similar tone of voice.”
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