Amanda Hesser leaving Food52
May 27, 2025 by DarcieAmanda Hesser, one of pioneering website Food52’s founding members, announced in her newsletter that she is stepping away from the company. She will focus on her Substack Homeward in which she is chronicling her home renovation in Ojai, plus providing design picks, recipes, and travel recommendations. Hesser said that after 16 years at the company, it is time for her “to take up new challenges and adventures.”
Food52 launched in 2009 (coincidentally, the same year as Eat Your Books) and quickly became a top recipe website, featuring an active and loyal online community. After growing steadily for a decade, the site exploded during the pandemic, tripling its revenue from 2019 to 2021 following a cash infusion from private equity company TCG. After acquiring a majority stake for $83 million USD, TCG pumped an additional $80 million into the company, which Food52 used to expand its sales operation and buy out investors. This included plans to build a brick-and-mortar store and the purchase of a small but successful home goods producer called Schoolhouse. Things were looking bright for the company.
However, in the past three years, Food52’s revenue has plummeted, and it has gone through several rounds of layoffs and has scaled back its commerce business. Part of the problem is that people are not buying the same types of things in the same amounts as they did during the pandemic. Another issue contributing to the decline is that the company has abandoned its roots. Instead of continuing to focus on the community that helped build it, Food52 instead doubled down on selling more goods. The website was revamped to highlight products instead of recipes or stories. As one analyst put it, “It went from a great community where the product development team would create new physical things…based on feedback from the audience to an uninteresting ecommerce business selling the same stuff everyone else had. Boring.”
In 2024, a new CEO, Erika Ayers Badan, was brought on board to help turn the company around. She is cutting out much of the drop-ship commerce business and is returning the focus to the media side of Food52, aiming to revive the sense of community. These seem like positive changes, but whether this strategy is too little, too late remains to be seen and the company faces an uphill battle. Amanda Hesser, on the other hand, is certainly doing well in Ojai.
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