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.”