The New York Times & Chef’d have teamed up for a new service in meal delivery services. Chef’d is already working with other publishers and chefs, and describes their selves as bridging the “last mile between the recipe and your front door.”
New York Times & Chef’d.
In the boxes you will find the recipes that are published by the newspaper on the New York Times Cooking webpages. The site was founded in September 2014, and includes 17,000 recipes from the Times archives and attracts 7 million visitors each month. Chef’d delivers the boxes with ‘a la carte’ orders to people that signed up for an so called flexible subscription.
Target audience.
According to Alice Ting from The New York Times, their readers spend a lot of time on cooking at home, so therefor it’s a very logical step to find and explore the possibilities in this food market. If they didn’t think they could earn revenue, the wouldn’t even started with this in the first place.
Also in the US the meal delivery services are blooming. The German company and market leader HelloFresh has competition from services like Blue Apron and Plated.
Declining revenues from ads and subscriptions.
The New York Times has been in many ways to examine how newspapers can make money from their content, brand and journalists. Newspapers and print publications experiencing difficult times. Last year, the NYT even got 94% of its revenue from subscriptions and advertising. Meanwhile, the newspaper has 1.36 million paying digital subscribers for online services. Advertising revenue for both print and digital, declined in the first quarter.
Travel agency
The newspaper already takes more trips out to other markets, such as lectures, a wine club, a shop with gadgets with Time logos and a thriving travel agency, Times Journeys. To travel to particular destinations like Iran or Cuba headed by the foreign correspondents of the newspaper. Last year the income from other services from the newspaper were NYT $ 95 million, reports Bloomberg. According to Ting, the meal boxes / Dinner kits will be at least as large as the Times Journeys.