New York Times Will Now Deliver Ingredients For Its Recipes To Your Doorstep

If you’ve read a recipe in the newspaper and quietly wondered where you would find some of the ingredients, the New York Times has found a new way to solve that problem. They’ve partnered up with Chef’d, an ingredient-delivery service, to create a branded meal subscription that combines the convenience of having your dinner delivered with the cachet of the New York Times brand, yet the inconvenience of having to cook the food yourself.

Meal-delivery services, if you’re not familiar with the idea, remove the shopping and meal-planning components from home cooking. They deliver recipes along with the quantity of each ingredient that you’ll need to make them.

This business is an easy target for mockery, but is actually not a bad business idea for anyone involved in the newspaper-branded version. Like all news organizations, the New York Times needs to find ways to bring in money when online ads and subscriptions simply don’t bring in as much cash per reader as print advertising once did.

“Our audience spends a lot of time cooking at home,” the Times executive in charge of brand development, licensing, and syndication explained to Bloomberg Technology. “So for us it was a natural area to investigate.”

The meal subscription service gets a new partner with a built-in audience, and customers get meals curated by a brand that they trust. That subscription service, Chef’d, has other co-branded meal subscriptions, offering plans based on Weight Watchers and the fitness site Tone It Up.

New York Times to Start Delivering Meal Kits to Your Home [Bloomberg]
The New York Times Cooking [Signup]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist