Late last year, a week before Christmas, Erika Ayers Badan, the C.E.O. of recipe site Food52 and its home-furnishing and cookware brands, Schoolhouse and Dansk, called a virtual all-hands meeting for the entire company. Many on her staff assumed she’d be announcing some kind of lifeline, or perhaps new owners. “But no,” says Katie Elliott, the former creative director for all three brands. “It was ‘In five minutes, you’ll get a letter, whether you have a job or not.’” That day, 60 percent of the workforce was terminated. The day after Christmas, another 20 percent were out.
It was an unexpected turn of events for Food52, which began in 2009 as a mom-and-pop recipe site founded by former New York Times food reporter Amanda Hesser and her recipe-developing collaborator, Merrill Stubbs. The premise was simple: hold weekly recipe contests, then turn the winning dishes into a cookbook at the end of 52 weeks. “When we launched FOOD52, we weren’t trying to create a community,” Hesser recalled in a post to their Web site in 2011. “What we found, in a matter of weeks, was that a community of devoted home cooks swiftly and organically arose…. It was they—you!—who helped us figure out what the business would become.”
To investors, however, a community like this represents something else: an unpaid yet highly motivated army of content creators and marketers. Food52’s grassroots success soon attracted private-equity investment and ambitions far beyond the kitchen. By the time Badan took over, the company had expanded to include Schoolhouse and Dansk, while its founders had largely been relegated to board duty.
How had a beloved food Web site, with a community of unpaid contributors so devoted that some were eventually hired in-house, gone so terribly wrong? In the span of 16 years, Food52 had gone from a food-media darling with a cult following to a dysfunctional mess, dragged through bankruptcy and sold off for parts at the start of the year. (Both Hesser and Stubbs declined to comment for this story.)
Few company veterans would speak on the record about its rise and fall. One former executive I reached out to broke down on the phone while remembering her time there and had to hang up. Others insisted on anonymity. “I kind of just tried to keep my nose out of things,” said one early hire. Things had come a long way from the early days, when a small team built the site out of Hesser’s Brooklyn kitchen.
A Recipe for Success
When the company launched in 2009, Hesser and Stubbs worked from Hesser’s town house, cooking through the most promising submissions to their site. As the audience built up, the community became Food52’s driving force. Some of the most engaged contributors acted as a “first line of defense,” answering readers’ most pressing food questions via the site’s Food Pickle hotline. “It felt pretty groundbreaking at the time,” recalls an early staffer. “It wasn’t just, like, ‘We are experts, and we’re telling you what you are doing wrong.’” Hesser even invited her contributors to events at her home. Inside the company, the atmosphere was just as intimate—and all-consuming. “It was a really intense, fun, quick-paced schedule,” the staffer says. “A lot of work with a very, very tiny team.”
Hesser and Stubbs imbued the site with a sense of trust that was rare online. The recipes were well liked because someone had cooked them and cared whether they worked for you. The comments section was full of helpful tips rather than sniping and spam. Nobody was trying to upsell you. If a Food52 editor recommended a Dutch oven, the reasonable assumption was that they used it. It felt like a neighborhood. That goodwill helped fuel the site’s rapid growth.
By 2019, Food52 was a serious player in food media, with a staff of more than 80 and a monthly reach approaching 16 million across its platforms. But the site’s success came at a price. Eric Kim, now a New York Times food columnist, joined the company in 2018. “Everyone was in their 20s,” he said on Matt Rodbard’s Taste podcast last winter. “It was the cool place to be.”
By then, Food52 had expanded beyond recipes into e-commerce, selling aprons with built-in pot holders and double-sided cutting boards with juice troughs, corner spouts, and phone stands, among an ever growing assortment of kitchen accessories. It operated an online marketplace where community members weighed in on designs, from cutting-board shapes to dish-towel fabrics. The products it sold were not so much a catalogue as they were a sensibility. “It felt curated; they had a point of view,” says Air Mail columnist Adam Rapoport, who watched Food52’s rise from a competitor’s vantage as editor of Bon Appétit. “Everything was that sort of neutral color palette. Everything felt very at home in a Brooklyn Heights town house.… It was less about who the maker was and more about ‘Does it fit our aesthetic?’”
Behind that carefully curated exterior, however, the company could feel considerably less serene. For Kim, the experience became “pretty traumatizing”—working “80-hour weeks” at what he called a “talent-and-terror incubator,” where young writers jockeyed for bylines and attention. “Everyone was competing for scarce resources,” he says. “People like us who had voices were celebrated,” but others felt “constantly tamped down, told to be quiet.” Layoffs seemed to come quarterly. Similar complaints would echo through later regimes.
Corporate suitors soon came calling. In late September 2019, growth-equity firm the Chernin Group (T.C.G.) acquired a controlling stake for $83 million. For Hesser and Stubbs, the T.C.G. money was life-changing. “We realized that there was huge potential to really blow this out,” Stubbs told The Wall Street Journal that year. Hesser announced plans to open a flagship brick-and-mortar shop and expand the company’s in-house product line. But the new money was earmarked for growth, not for shoring up the existing team. Even as Food52 grew, the layoffs continued.
“[It was] a talent-and-terror incubator.… Everyone was competing for scarce resources.”
T.C.G. was less interested in Food52 as a content business than as an efficient sales engine. Hesser and Stubbs had been describing Food52 as a whole-home lifestyle brand for years. By 2019, according to the company’s own announcement of the deal, e-commerce already accounted for roughly three-quarters of revenue and was the fastest-growing segment of the business, about 50 percent a year. The company only spent the equivalent of 5 percent of its e-commerce revenue on paid marketing; its established audience drove most sales.
Mike Kerns, the T.C.G. partner who led the deal and joined the board, explained the appeal to The Hollywood Reporter that fall: Food52 “built an organic audience and converted that audience into purchasing products without spending money on Google and Facebook.” Early retail experiments, Stubbs told Business of Home that fall, had taught them that “everything sold.… It really was anything that we tried.”
Warren Shoulberg, a veteran housewares-industry journalist, recalls finding the logic sound. “As a food site, I thought it made some sense to go into e-commerce,” he says. “They certainly had a good fan base and loyal customers.”
Then came the pandemic, when the whole world began cooking at home, supercharging the company’s commercial ambitions. Revenue soared—even as Kim and many others were laid off that April.
T.C.G., which doubled its investment in December 2021, valued the barely profitable company at a jaw-dropping $300 million. Virtually everyone I spoke to agreed: that was when the real trouble began. “You’re upside down from the beginning,” says Sara Fritsch, then president of Schoolhouse, the Portland home-goods company that Food52 would soon acquire—and one of the few people willing to speak on the record for this story. “In what world was that valuation ever justified? That’s the root cause of everything that came after.”
At the time, though, $300 million did not look quite so crazy. Other digital-media start-ups of the era, from Vox to Vice to BuzzFeed, had all achieved billion-dollar valuations. And Food52 had the numbers to support the enthusiasm: revenue had nearly tripled from 2019 to 2021, rising from $32 million to $80 million, putting the company’s valuation at less than four times annual sales. “The relationship has been phenomenal,” Kerns told Axios in December 2021. “The company is performing extremely well—way ahead of where we had anticipated.” Hesser called T.C.G. “an incredible partner.”
Nine months before the second cash infusion, T.C.G. co-founder Jesse Jacobs warned on a media podcast against companies becoming over-capitalized. “Don’t get caught up with raising too much capital and going down that venture or growth-equity hamster wheel if you don’t need to,” he said. Instead, T.C.G. tripled Food52’s valuation, and the company began spending lavishly.
With the influx of cash came a mandate to grow. Work began on a luxurious new 41,000-square-foot headquarters in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, featuring six full test kitchens; photo, video, and podcast studios; and multiple entertaining and meeting spaces with foodie-themed names like the Togarashi, Negroni, and Moon Pie rooms. The C-suite swelled with executives sporting fancy titles. “Everyone was, like, an S.V.P. and a chief of this or chief of that,” Fritsch says.
Meanwhile, Food52 went on a corporate shopping spree, snapping up Schoolhouse and Dansk, the American cookware-and-tabletop brand rooted in Danish design. “We feel a powerful kinship with their mission,” Hesser enthused in a December 2021 press release announcing the Schoolhouse deal. Food52 had conquered the kitchen; why not move on to other rooms in the house? “While food is at the core of our company,” she told Modern Retail magazine, “we kind of touch all aspects of your cooking and home life.”
But running a recipe site was one thing; running a home-goods manufacturer was another. Management found itself grappling with supply chains and a unionized factory workforce just as Schoolhouse was expanding its product line. The culture clash hit hard and fast. “Who thinks they can run a factory if they’ve never run one?,” Fritsch says. “It makes no sense, right? But they really thought they could. Like, ‘How hard could it be?’ And it’s, by the way, very, very hard.”
Trying to force a synergy between the three businesses was worse.”They wanted us to sell all their crappy products on the [Schoolhouse] site, and they wanted to sell our nice products on their crappy site,” Fritsch says. “There could have been a thoughtful way to do that. But someone looking for a free apple-strudel recipe isn’t going to suddenly buy a $3,000 chandelier, right?”
The New Guy
In 2022, Food52 brought in a new co-C.E.O., Alex Bellos, a former West Elm president with a background in home furnishings, and soon Fritsch was out. Hesser remained co-C.E.O. “for a little bit,” Elliott recalls, before moving to the board. “And then she was definitely pushed out and was not involved for quite some time.”
Bellos envisioned a product-first company, with the food content on which it had been built pushed to the sidelines. “It was just a firehose of design and development, not necessarily building the team downstream to support it,” Elliott says. “Alex’s idea was to add five more brands under the umbrella.” He ramped up pressure on Schoolhouse to roll out new products quickly. “Alex wanted to offer all the lighting in all the colors, and that just crippled the factory.”
The spending kept pace with the ambition. Budgets for Schoolhouse photo shoots, once capped at $15,000, ballooned into six-figure campaigns shot on location in Los Angeles, according to the business magazine Inc. A part-time creative director was hired for $22,000 a month. Bellos spent the better part of a year preparing to fold in Five Marys Ranch, a California meat company turned lifestyle brand, with a new Web site ready to launch, before the deal collapsed at the last minute. He lasted barely a year on the job.
Internally, the churn continued. A former executive I spoke with, who requested anonymity, counted three C.E.O.’s, three managers, and four rounds of layoffs in barely two and a half years. “It was the worst job I’ve ever had,” she told me. “And I’ve been working for over 20 years.” Directives often allegedly contradicted one another. “People would say, Oh, well, Amanda said that, but you don’t have to do that, because I’m the boss,” Fritsch recalls. “And then the other person would be like, Oh, she’s not the boss. He’s the boss. Listen to me.” Teams were handed revenue targets but lacked the inventory to meet them, then were blamed for missing the mark. “We were just all punished constantly,” a former marketing employee told Inc. “We were told that you obviously don’t care, because you’re not making this work.”
“It was the worst job I’ve ever had. And I’ve been working for over 20 years.”
And no one seemed to be watching the money. Between 2021 and 2023, Shannon Muldoon, who ran the company’s branded-content arm, Studio52, charged more than $270,000 in personal expenses to her corporate card—Botox treatments, an elite-gym membership, and $126,000 in clothing from Net-a-Porter. She’d coded everything in the internal system, but no red flags were raised. The spending continued even after her department dissolved and she landed a new role in talent management. Muldoon, perhaps sensing the jig was up, was on medical leave when the charges finally drew attention. She was eventually fired, later indicted for grand larceny, and ultimately accepted a plea deal of five years’ probation. The story became public only last year.
By the time Bellos’s replacement was named in the spring of 2024, the company was in free fall. At the start of the year, 22 percent of the workforce across Food52, Schoolhouse, and Dansk had been eliminated, according to Business of Home. So T.C.G. turned to a trusted hand to salvage its investment: Erika Ayers Badan, with whom it had already enjoyed one spectacular success.
As C.E.O. of Barstool Sports, she had helped turn the bro-humor sports blog into a digital juggernaut valued at $551 million, earning T.C.G. a handsome return on its early stake. She began advising Food52 upon joining its board in November 2023. “There was something very human about the way the brand organically grew and developed product,” she told Business of Home in April 2024. “I think they lost that.” She hoped to “reignite the storytelling and get back to being community-oriented.”
The Bitter End
In her new role at Food52, Ayers Badan hoped to “Barstool it a little bit,” she told Jennifer Cohen on the Habits and Hustle podcast that summer, by adding more personalities and native content, all better integrated into the e-commerce side of the business. She wanted Schoolhouse to operate like a “news station,” a former marketing employee told Inc. “We should have three social posts a day. We should be running a breakfast, lunch, and dinner cycle,” Elliott says. “That is very hard for a brand that sells physical goods.” There was plenty of talk about a turnaround, she recalls, but few concrete plans: “There were a lot of sound bites and not a lot of meat behind that.”
In an e-mail to Air Mail, Ayers Badan says there were concrete plans, pointing to her creation of “new supply chain practices,” “new lines of revenue,” and her cutting of costs by over 20 percent, among other achievements. Resistance to her plan was itself, she writes, the problem. The Schoolhouse marketing team, she says, “wanted to stick to doing photo shoots and expensive catalogues” instead of content and programming, which “unlocks better story telling, creates more brand-love, better features the company’s products and creates a tighter connection with the community.” Most successful brands do this, she writes. “Schoolhouse was less than enthusiastic.”
Reshaping a legacy business while chasing growth “is a painful, ambitious and risky endeavor,” writes Ayers Badan. “It also leaves people bitter.” Food52 was no exception.
Ayers Badan turned her attention to her affluent neighbors in Connecticut, opening a Schoolhouse pop-up shop near her home. “There was this focus on her peers as a demographic—we have to get in front of these wealthy Connecticut homeowners,” Elliott says. “Tons of money was spent to do that, and there was no return on it, really.” The pop-up, says Elliot, was one of many such projects: “They were a constant distraction, and there were a million of those, but no grander scheme for a one-, two-, or three-year plan.”
But Ayers Badan counters that Schoolhouse’s customer base was small and heavily concentrated in the Pacific Northwest. Growing it meant courting interior designers and affluent homeowners elsewhere, most of whom “had either never heard of Schoolhouse or weren’t buying it.” The Connecticut pop-up was, she says, one piece of a regional push that also took in Washington, D.C.; Charleston, South Carolina; and Minneapolis.
Ayers Badan doesn’t dispute where things went wrong. “I don’t think there was one mistake; I think there were 500 mistakes,” she said on Puck’s Grill Room podcast last January. “Myself included. I made mistakes during my tenure as well.” However, considering that she inherited a business that had burned through $200 million in investment, had taken on $25 million in debt, and was losing more than $15 million a year, she says, “Food52 was mission impossible and had been for a long time.”
By late 2025, Ayers Badan had been in the job for a little more than 18 months when Avidbank—the secured lender behind Food52’s credit line—swept the company’s accounts, clearing out nearly every cent. According to Ayers Badan’s declaration to the bankruptcy court, the bank took the operating capital, employee payroll, and cash held in trust for the I.R.S. Payroll became an hourly calculation. “Like, do I have enough money to pay everyone who’s here through the end of the day today?” she told Grill Room. Two days later, she called the all-hands meeting.
“I think there were 500 mistakes. Myself included. I made mistakes during my tenure as well.”
The company filed for Chapter 11 on December 29. At the February bankruptcy auction, the company’s parts went for mere fractions of their former valuations: Food52 for $9.9 million to Culinary Media Group, a Marquee Brands subsidiary that also owns America’s Test Kitchen; Schoolhouse to the Hudson Valley Lighting Group for $2.2 million; and Dansk, the biggest bargain, to Form Portfolios, a design-licensing company focused on heritage brands, for $250,000.
Food52 was not T.C.G.’s only casualty. The firm had made the same content-to-commerce bet across its portfolio of enthusiast sites, rushing them into e-commerce and scaling quickly. By late 2025, as Adweek reported, the strategy had largely collapsed, taking the watch site Hodinkee and the bike retailer the Pro’s Closet down with it. The economics proved harder than they first seemed. Content is expensive to produce, and most consumers never buy anything. “It went from a great community where the product development team would create new physical things … based on feedback from the audience,” the media analyst Jacob Cohen Donnelly wrote in an autopsy of the company, “to an uninteresting e-commerce business selling the same stuff everyone else had. Boring.” (T.C.G. did not respond to AIR MAIL’s requests for comment.)
Today, Food52 carries on under America’s Test Kitchen, its vast recipe archive still online and the site looking much as it always did. Schoolhouse returned in July in a leaner form, its lamps and bedding back in stock but now made overseas; the Portland factory has closed for good. Dansk, meanwhile, is rebuilding under its new owner, which is re-establishing the brand’s design studio in Copenhagen.
Ayers Badan, who now writes a Substack about women in the workplace, has, by her own admission, become moderately obsessed with bankruptcy. She expects more of the same. “The houses are going to crumble,” she said on Grill Room. “If you look in the media business, everyone is for sale. All these business models are challenged.... This is coming.”
Hesser has also moved on, living in Ojai, California, where she launched a new Substack chronicling a gut renovation of her Craftsman home. “After 16 years at Food52,” she wrote to her subscribers in May of last year, “it’s time to take my April Fool’s parodies, fussing over office lighting, cooking know-how, and love for homeware manufacturing to future ventures. I’m eager to build new things!”
Jay Cheshes writes about art, culture, food, travel, and crime. He is a contributing editor at the Financial Times’s HTSI Magazine and a regular contributor to Smithsonian Magazine. He trained as a chef at the Culinary Institute of America and has served as a restaurant critic for Gourmet and Time Out New York