NYT Cooking, the subscription recipe site from The New York Times, will sell $95 at-home cooking kits curated by guest chefs as a new means to grow revenue and boost readership for the service.
Beginning on Wednesday, readers — regardless if they are subscribers — can visit the New York Times online store to be notified when the kits are available for purchase. At launch, NYT Cooking will offer three different kits created by the chefs Nina Compton, Chintan Pandya and Naoko Takei Moore, in partnership with Times cooking journalists.
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Unlike other meal delivery services, each kit will only include non-perishable items. The focus will instead be toward speciality ingredients that can be used across four signature recipes from the chefs, which will be written down in a booklet inside the kit, and four other recipes on NYT Cooking that incorporate similar ingredients. Home cooks who prefer a more visual experience will also receive access to a video tutorial for two recipes from each chef.
Compton, of the New Orleans–based restaurant Compère Lapin, has curated a Caribbean Creole cuisine kit inspired by Compton’s upbringing and heritage. The kit is expected to provide essential and speciality ingredients that can be used for traditional recipes and signature dishes from the James Beard winner’s restaurant.
Moore’s kit takes inspiration from her Japanese clay pot (“donabe”) and kitchenware store Toiro Kitchen in West Hollywood. The essentials kit will guide home cooks through the art of donabe cooking. And for Pandya, the chef behind Unapologetic Foods and Dhamaka, his NYT Cooking kit is positioned as an “Indian pantry kit” that will explore key ingredients for regional Indian cooking.
“We’re always just thinking of ways we can connect with our community more and more. Of course we love doing what we do through the [NYT Cooking] app, but it’s always just so amazing to actually be able to get that much closer to in-real-life interactions,” Genevieve Ko, a senior editor for NYT Cooking, told The Hollywood Reporter. “We’re not just giving you recipes through the app or the site, but actually providing you with some of the ingredients so that you can get started and actually share the whole experience with us.”
Though the cooking kits will be limited in stock, the venture provides a unique opportunity for the Times to bring in an additional source of revenue outside of subscriptions. In December, the Times said that NYT Cooking, which costs $5 a month or $40 a year, crossed 1 million subscriptions.
And beginning later this month, NYT Cooking staff will be going on tour in Los Angeles, New Orleans and New York City for intimate classes, workshops and tasting experiences with the three guest chefs, culminating in the Times’ food festival on Oct. 8. Tickets for the events with the guest chefs range in price from $75 to $150.
“We’re really excited to get to actually meet members of the cooking community,” Ko said.
