In the early 1990s, as Amanda Hesser's college friends were interviewing for their first cubicle jobs, she chose a different path; one that led straight into the kitchens of Europe, where she cooked traditional recipes and learned the rhythm of the seasons from a crusty French gardener. By 24, she had landed a book deal and one of the most coveted jobs in journalism: writing about food for the New York Times. But over time she grew restless, and in 2008, gave up that dream job—and the stability that went with it—to become an entrepreneur. When her first business fizzled out, Amanda took a financial risk by pivoting again to launch a new company: Food52. Part food blog, part e-commerce site for all things kitchen and home, Food52 is now valued around $300 million and achieved profitability for the first time during the pandemic.




This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner, with music by Ramtin Arablouei

Edited by Neva Grant, with research help from Daryth Gayles.




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So some of the brands that we feature on the show offer services that you may only use from time to time like Zillow or JetBlue or Wirecutter.

All great resources, but you probably aren't buying a house or researching a vacuum every day.

But chances are you're in the kitchen a lot more often.

Maybe you don't cook 7 days a week, but you might cook something at least once a week, which is where Food 52 comes in.

Amanda Hesser wanted to be a resource for recipes and cookware and home goods that could be used 52 weeks a year.

And the story of how she did it is filled with pivots that even she never would have imagined.

We first ran this episode in April of 2021, and I hope you enjoy it.

Did you guys get to the point where you were almost out of cash?

Yeah, we cried over pizza and but really good pizza and you know We needed to have a conversation of like where is our breaking point?

Because it felt like we just it wasn't that we had no traction, we definitely had people interested, but we just couldn't get that lead.

And then I actually like, often with things that are bad memories, I sort of shove them into a drawer somewhere in my brain.

And I don't know, maybe it was a good pizza that we were just like, yes, we're going to keep going.

Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Raz and on the show today, how Amanda Hesser walked away from 1 of the most coveted jobs in journalism to build a digital media company for recipes and kitchen gear called Food52.

Some of my favorite people to hang out with are reporters.

They generally tend to be fun and interesting and a little snarky, but usually with the best intentions.

And because I used to be 1 myself, I understand where they're coming from.

Reporters actually have a lot of the same skills and qualities required to become a great entrepreneur.

They know how to become experts pretty fast.

They know how to ask questions, how to get around insurmountable obstacles, how to spot an opportunity.

And some of them are pretty big risk takers.

They stand in waist deep water in the middle of hurricanes and jump into the middle of war zones.

But for all the entrepreneurial zeal embedded in the profession, there is 1 thing that many journalists share that is not conducive to starting a business.

They're trained to doubt and debate everything they're told.

Unlike many of the founders I've met, the very best reporters are generally not fake-it-till-you-make-it type of people.

They're meticulous about getting the facts straight and making sure they're not getting spun by a source.

Well, it can make you kind of cynical, suspicious, even a bit jaded, none of which is helpful if suddenly you decide you want to start a business.

So when a story of a former journalist turned entrepreneur crosses my desk, I get excited because it's a reminder that it takes a lot of courage to leave a prestigious job in a newsroom.

But that is essentially what Amanda Hesser did.

For a little over 10 years, Amanda had 1 of the most coveted jobs in journalism.

She was a food critic and writer at the New York Times, testing recipes, writing reviews, and compiling cookbooks.

It's the kind of job a lot of people would've stayed at forever.

Amanda decided to take a big risk and start her own venture, a food blog called Food52.

With a limited amount of money and using her own apartment as a test kitchen, Amanda and her co-founder, Merrill Stubbs, gradually and sometimes painfully built Food 52 into a digital media company, which today reaches about 25 million users a month.

And along the way, Amanda sort of combined the best of 2 careers.

The relentless drive and intensity of a New York Times reporter and the improvisational instincts of an entrepreneur.

Instincts she actually learned from her dad.

In the 1970s, when Amanda was a kid, her dad owned a Chevy dealership in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Her parents took out a massive loan to buy that dealership, and Amanda remembers her dad as a smart and scrappy businessman.

1 of my memories around that is he created something called the Jello Jump.

And it involved filling a garbage dumpster, a clean garbage dumpster, with orange jello and Putting a bunch of numbered keys in the bottom of the dumpster and so every number correlated with a prize and 1 of the prizes was a car and so in order to get your key you had to jump into the Jell-O dumpster.

And he just instinctively knew that this was funny and also would energize people.

And the local news media covered it and lots of people came and it was like a hot summer day and the perfect day for jumping in a dumpster of Jell-O.

And there was definitely a sense in the household of, you know, I felt like we felt as a family kind of like the pressures of what it was like to build a business.

There was the oil crisis, so gas prices were up and people weren't buying cars.

But there was also a few years after my parents bought this dealership, it went up in flames.

And the whole building burnt to the ground in the middle of the night and it was just a giant fire because you know when when A building filled with cars that are filled with gasoline Catches fire.

So he you know, they lost most of everything They had some cars and a lot across the street that hadn't been damaged.

And it was a very sort of defining moment for, I think me as a child in that, I think a lot of people could really feel quite defeated.

And my memory is that my dad didn't pause for a moment.

He immediately rented a trailer so that he could have a temporary office and you know continued selling the cars that weren't burned.

What what were you like as as a teenager?

Like to tell me, tell me what you remember about what you were like.

So I was a good student and I, you know, I was a very like, you know, involved in a lot of school activities.

I was very active But I you know, I think that a couple of things like heavily influenced.

Certainly my teenage years When I was 11, you know my dad he had a massive heart attack and from from he you know, he survived this heart attack but it severely diminished his health and It was a pretty intense period of my life and I think that you know at that age I was I just had a very different feeling about my parents than most teenagers, you know, I think You know, I had a real appreciation for the fact that they were alive And it was very clear that to me that like, you know life was precious and this was We were lucky.

you How did you kind of discover your interest in food?

I think it took me a while to realize that.

It took me to leaving home to realize that.

Even though I come from a family with very, kind of like, I would say, like a very kind of like working class values, food was always a really important part of our family life and kind of everyone cooked or contributed in some way.

You know I think about like you know when we would go to my grandparents in Maryland we would go crabbing and then we would cook the crabs and we would eat them with tomatoes that they grew in their garden.

My mom, you know, she would even bake her own bread and, you know, she always made jam in the summer.

And like my, when my mother would go to the grocery store, I, I'm very, you know, list oriented.

So I would always be like, okay, mom, what's the list?

And she said, well, you know, I have a couple of things on the list, but I just want to see what looks good.

She didn't go in saying like, we're gonna have steak.

She would go in and look at what she determined, what she deemed, you know, good quality, and then decide on what we were going to have from there.

And so I think there was a lot of influence that was built in to my upbringing.

And, you know, and it was even something that I think was a little weird back then.

Like I remember, you know, 1 of my best friends coming over and her crying at our dinner table because my mom was serving asparagus and, you know, that's not an unusual vegetable now, but certainly in, you know, in Pennsylvania in the 70s, it was nobody was really eating asparagus.

I know, Amanda, that you went to college at Bentley University near Boston to study finance.

But I guess when you graduated, you decided that you wanted to go into food, into the food world, and maybe become a chef.

So I just wanna back up a minute, because So between my junior and senior years, my dad died.

And that was a big, obviously, you know, it was a devastating moment.

And, you know, put me, you know, in a place where I felt quite lost.

But I also, looking back, I realized that it was, it was this moment of like liberation from Like I felt so lost that I felt like I did I really didn't have to conform to anybody's expectation about what I should or shouldn't do after college.

In large part because of his death, because.

Yeah, like I was so unhappy and really wrecked by it that I just, in an odd way, it freed me up because I just wasn't, I wasn't driven to please anyone, you know?

I was really, I think I understood that I had to find my way and that I had to find my way to happiness, even if it meant following an unconventional path.

You know, and I remember a bunch of my college friends were getting ready to like do interviews and they were all buying kind of work clothes.

And I just thought, oh, that's the last thing I want to do right now and it was it was just 1 of the many signals to me that I needed to push myself to find what interested me.

I wrote to my favorite chef in Boston, Jody Adams, who at the time ran a restaurant called Michaela's.

And I just said, I'm really interested in working.

And so she hired me and I was like a kitchen runner basically.

And it was like 3 women, and I was 1 of them.

And we would get the ovens heated, we would mix the bread, shape it, bake it, and then I would drive a truck around Boston in the middle of the night, you're like in the early hours I would say, delivering the bread to hotels and restaurants.

And so, and then also I took this food history course at Radcliffe and I was so in over my head, but what was fascinating about it and so lucky was that in my class was Corby Kummer, who's a long time food writer and just editor and writer at the Atlantic.

Also another student was Cheryl Julian, who is the food editor at the Boston Globe.

And I was just like this kid in the class, and they took me under their wing and kind of showed me the way.

And it was really the first time that I saw that, oh, food writing

And I guess in the meantime, you were noticing that, you know, like a lot of young American cooks were going over to Europe and doing these like short training stints at restaurants there.

And I guess you decided that that sounded kind of interesting.

I, you know, it was an alternative way to really, to become a chef, but also to immerse yourself in a cuisine.

And I spent my spring break actually traveling, I went to Europe and I knocked on doors because, not to age myself, but at this point there was no email.

And you know, the only way, I mean, I wrote letters to these restaurants and bakeries and said, hi, you know, like, I really want to come work for you.

And so I would show it up on the doorstep to say like, hey, I was the 1 that wrote that letter and I really do wanna come.

So from what I have read, you managed to get, find a scholarship, a grant to enable you to spend a year overseas, like apprenticing in a bunch of different kitchens and and where was your first stop?

My first stop was in Germany in a small town in the black forest called Weingarten and I worked in a bread bakery there And I worked there for a few months and it was a very old-school bakery in the sense that in the front, the people who sold the bread were all women who wore these kind of like nice dresses and everyone who worked in the bread bakery was a man.

And so I, and I lived above the bakery in the bakery owners.

He had a spare apartment up there that was filled with his taxidermy prizes from his trips to Africa.

And so, yeah, and so I would sleep there with these kind of giant animal shadows looming and when the head baker would come in and turn on the oven, the whole building vibrated.

And that was my wake up call to get downstairs.

And, you know, it was, I would say it was not the most pleasant place to work.

But it was really, you know, I learned how to make pretzels and all sorts of different grain breads.

You know, the owner had a very fierce temper and if things didn't go the way he wanted them, he would often come in shouting and sometimes he would hit people over the head with a loaf of bread.

these are the sort of beginnings where I feel like I was, the sort of writer part of my soul was starting to come alive.

And I mean, you must have been, I mean, you know, I'm imagining you as a young woman, college graduate, recent college graduate, going to these places and Wanting to learn cooking but probably also pretty isolating

Yes, I you know this Again, This was a time that was not that long after my dad had died and I was doing this thing that no 1 I knew was doing.

And because communication was so different then, the only way that I could really stay in touch with my friends and family was to write them letters.

And it awakened this part of me that I didn't even know existed, and that I think I would say I actively resisted previously.

I never really liked my English courses, or I never valued them.

And suddenly I was just writing all of the time and really enjoying it, and also getting interesting, like sort of positive feedback from it.

And again, it was just a seed that was planted, but I wasn't really intent on doing something about it.

It just happened to be something that I was really like a muscle that I was forced to develop.

This was my sort of lifeline to people who I cared about.

All right, so you're kind of bouncing around Europe at this time, I guess, like working in restaurants and some bakeries.

And I guess eventually you land in France at the cooking school, La Verraine, the famous cooking school there.

And I know you kind of went there as part of like a work-study program where you sort of worked for the owner of the school and then cooked for a family.

I mean, did you live in her house, or would you show up every day, or what?

Well, she had a giant chateau in Burgundy that it was sort of wonderful in that it wasn't that fancy.

It was actually kind of falling apart, but this very beautiful old 17th century chateau that she lived in and that the cooking school was also in.

And so yeah, anyone who worked there also lived there.

I had only intended to stay for kind of a few months, but then she worked, she was working on a new cookbook, and so I decided to stay on and help her with that.

And it was during the course of that project that I started to really see how food writing worked.

I felt like my attraction and interest in it started intensifying.

But more importantly, I felt like I was getting to a point where I felt like I had knowledge to share and I had stories to share.

And I had 1 in particular that I really wanted to tell, which was her gardener, Mr.

Milbair, who also lived on the property, He grew many of the vegetables and fruits that we used in the kitchen.

It was a walled garden and had been there actually I think even longer than the chateau.

There was the foundation of an old ice house.

It just like was this, this whole place was like this museum of French life from hundreds of years ago.

And he also seemed like this relic of the past.

You know, he rolled his own cigarettes, He planted according to the moons.

He was this very kind of cranky, grumbly gardener who had this tiny little dog named Pousse who would follow him around.

I just thought, well, this is the France that I've been looking for.

These are the people who like I want to get to know.

But at the same time, I was also really cognizant of the fact that even though I grew up with the, you know, upbringing I had where, you know, we cooked, my mom cooked seasonally, we, you know, we ate a huge variety of food and everything was homemade, you know, made from scratch.

I didn't understand fully the cycle of the seasons and like how it influenced like what you, you know, if you cooked seasonally, like genuinely seasonally, like what that really would look like.

And so my idea was to write about getting to know, well, basically my idea was first just a project.

You know, I asked Anne, like, can I stay another year and just follow Monsieur Melbert around and get to know him and what he does and continue cooking?

Hilbert reluctantly agreed to it and you know then once I started you know following him around and just keeping notes.

And I could very quickly see that there was a story to be told.

And I felt like there was a story that I wanted to preserve.

I wanted to preserve in some tiny way this way of life.

And I felt like my understanding at that point of how to put together a cookbook as a way a framework in which to tell the story made sense.

So I, you know, developed this idea to write a book that was, you know, each chapter was a month of the year and and I told stories about Mr.

Milbear and like what I was learning from him and what I was cooking in the kitchen.

And I didn't really think there was anything necessarily innovative about it.

I was really focused on the preservation aspect.

But it really is, It was 1 of the earlier cookbooks that celebrated seasonal cooking and kind of made a point to say that it matters and that it's a better way of approaching cooking.

I mean, you're in your early 20s and I'm assuming you don't – you have no experience or you have no – probably no book agent.

So what did you, how did you, how did you pitch this idea to publishers?

I looked up cookbook agents, and then I, you know, wrote a proposal and sent it to all of them and Followed up by by fax And phone call and 1 day a fax came through from an agent named Doe Coover Who's based in Massachusetts and she said I'd you know, I'd love to work with you.

And I have to assume it was probably a small contract because it was your first book.

Which probably for you is like crazy money.

But around that time, I guess you somehow kind of got on the radar screen of the New York Times.

Yeah, so, you know, while I was working on the book and I think even leading up to the proposal, I had started pitching newspapers and magazines, You know, and I think that what I was imagining was going to happen after I finished my book was that I would then become a freelance writer.

And I actually moved home to Pennsylvania and I lived in my mom's house for a year and wrote my book.

And towards the end of that, I decided I was gonna move to Los Angeles because I had a boyfriend who lived there.

And I felt like that would be a boost to my freelance opportunities because the woods of Pennsylvania was not gonna do much for me.

So I started making a plan to leave and 4 days before I left, I got a phone call from the New York Times from an editor at the New York Times, you know, saying that he was empty, he had heard about me and was interested in talking with me, which was quite a shock.

You got this call from an editor at the New York Times.

And Rick says, hey, do you want to come to New York to meet?

And I explained I was moving to LA and he said, well, can you come before?

And so the day, I think it was the day before I went and

The day before you were supposed to move to LA

to move to LA yeah, and I it was a warm spring day like a like an unseasonably warm spring day and I didn't the only nice clothes I had were wool pants and a suede jacket that I'd bought when I was a student in London and so I wore them and I just poured sweat the entire time because I was so nervous.

And he was an editor at the dining in dining out section?

He was actually creating the dining in dining out section.

Yes, and so they were staffing up, they were really investing in it.

And I did the interview, and then I moved because I thought, well, I'm not gonna get this job.

And so about a month later, they said, you know, we'd like to fly you to New York for a day of interviews.

And I needed, you know, help from like, I didn't have a car.

I didn't have, you know, so my mom drove, you know, drove me to the city and...

You flew back to Pennsylvania and she drove you to New York.

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Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021)