New York Times to launch food delivery business

By Park Si-soo

The New York Times will add food delivery to its business portfolio, the latest effort to find new revenue sources to offset declines in print.

Starting this summer, the U.S. newspaper will begin selling ingredients for recipes from its NYT Cooking website, in partnership with a startup called Chef'd, according to Bloomberg and other media outlets.

According to CNNMoney, the Times will provide the recipes and Chef'd will take care of ingredients, delivery and logistics. Ordered ingredients will be delivered to readers within 48 hours, it said.

“Our audience spends a lot of time cooking at home,” Alice Ting, vice president of brand development, licensing, and syndication for the Times, said to Bloomberg. “So for us, it was a natural area to investigate.”

Bloomberg said NYT Cooking, edited by Times Food Editor Sam Sifton, has about 7 million monthly users and features more than 17,000 recipes from the Times archive.

The Times’ foray into food delivery is another example of how the news company is looking for new ways to make money from its content, brand and journalists to hedge against the uncertain future of newspapers.

In recent years, The New York Times has started businesses around live conferences, a wine club and an online store that sells hats, shirts and other trinkets with Times logos. The paper also runs a growing travel unit, “Times Journeys,” in which tourists pay thousands of dollars to see countries like Iran or Cuba. Times foreign correspondents lead many of the tours.