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Life is a combination of magic and pasta.

Federico Fellini

Dateline Charlottesville, VA

In This Issue

How Saveur magazine is rebuilding a ‘couture’ print presence for superfans

By Peter Houston

https://voices.media/

https://bit.ly/3ZeHgl4

After four years away from print, much-loved food and travel title Saveur is returning to readers’ coffee tables with bi-annual issues. EIC Kat Craddock describes them as ‘the couture’ in a publishing wardrobe that features an online archive of 8,000 recipes and digital service journalism that includes cookbook content, destination guides and tutorials. 

Launched in 1994, Saveur became a gourmet cooking, entertaining, and food travel magazine beloved by foodies and F&B professionals alike. But the pandemic hit it hard, and publisher Bonnier sold the title in 2020 to the venture equity group that would become digital media business Recurrent Ventures.

Inevitably, print was axed. “A lot of things were changing and shifting in the business at that time,” Kat Craddock, longtime staffer and now owner of Saveur told The Publisher Podcast. “It didn’t make sense for them to continue printing our regular magazine.”

Recurrent actively invested in Saveur’s online presence, building back from what Kat describes as ‘the contractions’ of the pandemic. However, as Recurrent’s only food-focused brand, it never seemed to quite fit with the group’s broader portfolio.

“In 2022 or so, it was starting to become clear that maybe Saveur was a bit of an odd fit for what Recurrent was doing,” Kat explains. “We’d seen a lot of publications shuttering, getting stripped for parts and sold off. I didn’t want to see that happen to our brand, so I approached the leadership and asked if they’d be open to me trying to take it over.”

The answer was “Yes”, and Saveur has been independent under Kat’s leadership for what she describes as a “very exciting” 18 months.

Print is back

Print was always part of the plan for Kat, and just nine months after taking over Saveur’s digital properties, she announced the pre-sale of the title’s first print issue in four years. “We kept hearing from our readers how much they missed it,” she says. “I had the sense that something that was so loved could work.”

However, Kat’s ‘Print is back’ announcement made it clear that things were going to be very different. In one of the most honest print-reboot memos I’ve read, she said, “Frankly, the old-school, high-volume print model isn’t sustainable”.

She explained that the magazine would cost more than it used to, frequency would drop to twice a year, print runs would be limited and supermarket distribution would be swapped out for sales through indie book and food stores and direct-to-readers through Saveur’s own website.

Also, the price would be going up.

Where old-school print was a numbers game, with subscriptions sold cheap to boost circulation for advertising sales, Print 2.0 requires readers to pay more. For Saveur that meant a new cover price of $25, plus postage.

“The Facebook comment sections remind me every day that we’re selling something for a lot more money than we used to,” she admits. “People that used to get them for $0.99 with their cable bill aren’t necessarily going to want to cough up $25 an issue.”

Sustainable for superfans

The magazine is not expensive because the Saveur team wants it to be exclusive. “It’s expensive because it costs a lot to make,” explains Kat. “I think enough people understand that the reason it went away in the first place is because it wasn’t sustainable.”

She says she understands the magazine isn’t for everybody, but she doesn’t want to devalue the work that goes into it. “We see our print product as the ‘couture’ of our brand. It’s for the superfans.”

The aim is to have an issue sit on readers’ coffee tables for six months, and on their bookshelf for years. “I hear from readers all the time that they’ve saved every issue,” Kat says. “I don’t want to make something that the pages are going to be falling out of in a month.”

Her publishing philosophy is if you can find enough people to buy the thing, you can make the thing, and the early audience focus was on Saveur’s legacy reader base. “We’re very fortunate that we have this legacy,” says Kat. “People that have been loving this brand for a long time, who want to see it succeed.”

Although a lot of early subscribers came from that cohort, Kat is also seeing interest from younger audiences. She spotlights journalism, design and photography students who she says seem to be craving that sort of physical experience.

“I don’t think that it’s just nostalgia from people that experienced this sort of media in the past that’s going to drive a revival in print. I think there is an appetite in younger readers as well.”

Digital revenue

Print is not primarily an advertising play for Saveur. “Print is our marketing tool,” says Kat. “It establishes our brand.”

But she acknowledges that Saveur also needs to be able to scale on some level to pay the bills. “We can reach a lot of eyeballs through our newsletters and through our website. People around the world are coming to us for our recipe content all the time,” Kat says.

The foundation of that offer is an archive of 8,000 recipes published over 30 years and available for free to anyone: “Our service content, our seasonal recipe content or tutorial content, that’s running digitally because that’s how people use that information.”

Most of Saveur’s advertising revenue is built on that digital foundation, with advertising packages bringing together digital branded content, newsletters and social media with a print component. “Something might run in print first, or might have a print component or a back cover component that then gets rolled out digitally in different ways,” Kat notes.

Independent priorities

Being independent, without the shared resources of a publishing group like Recurrent, has forced the Saveur team to prioritise. “We’ve had to dial it back,” says Kat. “We would love to be doing a tonne of video and a podcast every week, and a lot more multimedia. But that’s okay. We can make a really great print magazine.”

Restaurant industry experience has been a real benefit in her new independent publisher role. “Most of our team has some restaurant experience and they all have that ‘all hands on deck’ hustle. Everyone’s working across everything to find the right home for the types of stories that we want to tell.”

Recipe content will make its way from print to digital, but Kat says some magazine content simply doesn’t translate to the web. “If we’re investing in a big, beautiful photo essay…the point is that these images are running huge on beautiful paper. I don’t want everyone looking at it on their phone.”

PHOTO OF THE DAY