ATK poised to buy Food52

January 2, 2026 by
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Last week, Food52 filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition, seeking to reorganize the company’s assets and liabilities in an effort to avoid going out of business. America’s Test Kitchen has entered into an agreement to buy all of Food52’s assets, according to a press release issued just before the new year. According to a story on MSN, the sale price will be a paltry $6.5 million unless another bidder steps up. The sale is subject to bankruptcy court approval.

Food52 was founded 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 years of steady growth, the site exploded during the pandemic, tripling its revenue in three years following a 2019 cash infusion from private equity company TCG. After acquiring a majority stake for $83 million, TCG pumped an additional $80 million into the company, which Food52 used to expand its sales operation and buy out investors.

In its press release, ATK says that this acquisition “unites two preeminent media brands beloved by millions of fans”, and Daniel Suratt, CEO of America’s Test Kitchen, added that ATK believes “Food52 remains a singular media property with a strong legacy.” There were no further details offered on what the company plans to do with the Food52 assets.

In May of 2025, co-founder Amanda Hesser left the company amidst a sharp decline in revenue that started in 2022. Shifting consumer shopping habits were a factor in this decline, along with what seemed like an abandonment of the community that helped Food52 grow. 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.” To make things worse, one of the company’s executives embezzled nearly $300,000.

CEO Erika Ayers Badan was brought on board in 2024 to help turn the company around. She announced sweeping changes, vowing to return the site to its roots, re-emphasizing the community and scaling back the e-commerce portion of the site. Badan recently said that “The pivot from growth-at-all-costs to a model of responsible, profitable growth proved elusive to achieve.”

The efforts to revamp the site seemed haphazard. In September, we wrote about a new column that Food52 was rolling out featuring food writer Alexis deBoschnek called “From the Farm” that would include weekly musings from her idyllic farm in the Catskills. If there were additional columns with the “From the Farm” byline published, I have not been able to find them. Similarly, the recurring video feature called “Recipe Drop” has only had two new offerings since June of last year. Perhaps there are more, but there is no way to find all of the “Recipe Drop” videos to know for sure.

It will be interesting to see what ATK will do with Food52. Given ATK’s vast recipe library (68,000+ in the EYB Library) it hardly needs Food52’s recipes (14,960). Because ATK currently doesn’t have a product website this could be an easy way to slide into offering ingredients or equipment; however, that could be at odds with ATK’s emphasis on its unbiased reviews of such items. We will know more after the February 2 auction deadline runs. If you have a spare $7 million lying around, you could potentially buy a company that was once valued at over $300 million!

Category: Culinary News

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6 Comments

  • dbuhler  on  January 2, 2026

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like “…two preeminent media brands beloved by millions of fans” isn’t quite true. If that were the case, would Food52 filing for bankruptcy? Also ATK does sell products other than their books in their online store. I don’t know how they decided what to sell but it appears that it’s some of their top rated items. I’ve purchased a set of frying pans from their site before, and a quick glance shows currently for sale one of their winning knives, a pasta machine, a food processor, and a Lodge grill pan. Is it a good move to acquire Food52 for their e-commerce assets when that may have been the downfall of the brand to begin with? Or, are they just grabbing a good deal? It will be interesting to see what happens.

  • dowdpe  on  January 3, 2026

    Probably time to find the old recipes you like and print them off to pdf before they all disappear. I have found a number of recipes that I’ve used in the past are no longer on the site.

  • Zephyrness  on  January 3, 2026

    I left Food52 when the Piglet ended. It was already getting harder to find, so i wasn’t surprised. But I was sad.

  • Indio32  on  January 4, 2026

    Same old story of Private Equity screwing things up.

  • reader1trees  on  January 4, 2026

    I’m sorry to hear that Food52 is in such dire straits. I stumbled upon it during the pandemic and fell in love with Bake It Up A Notch, Big Little Recipes and Genius Recipes as well as the series that compared methods of cooking particular items. I particularly valued the comments from people who had tried the recipes and since those have vanished I don’t bother with the site anymore.
    I’m also a fan of ATK especially Lan Lam and the Gear Heads so will wait to see what happens next.

  • Ycool  on  January 10, 2026

    You never know you are part of a trend until you read an article like this. I loved Food52 for a long while, and then stopped when I felt it was becoming just another eCommerce site. If I want to binge on food product content, I just cruise the Sur La Table website and put things in my cart that I never buy. In 2023 I stopped cruising Food52 almost altogether. Note: Whenever you get bought by private equity, your purpose necessarily changes to whatever the corporate capitalists want you to be. It can and is seductive. But the businesses go out of business more often than not within a few years. Right now that scourge is hitting, of all things, private veterinary care. If you’ve noticed that your local vet now has stunning new offices no longer these humble storefronts, well that’s what’s happened. Its a terrible trend because the cost of veterinary care has shot through the roof, impacting the affordability of having pets at all, leading to more abandonment and population explosions.

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