Food52 marketplace case study: book a demo to start yours
Food52 is an online hub and community for food lovers, providing a diverse collection of recipes, culinary advice, and a marketplace for kitchen and dining items. If you’d like to start your own marketplace like Food52, you’re facing a buy vs build decision. So before you decide to build it in-house on top of Spree open-source, consider using Vendo, which is the feature-rich Enterprise Edition cutting your time-to-market to a few weeks.
Build vs Buy a marketplace?
Opting for open-source brings various benefits, including complete control and the liberty to customize. However, these advantages often come with substantial financial implications. Creating a complete marketplace solution is a long, expensive process, typically requiring many months or even years. This understanding is based on our experiences with different marketplace projects.
Unless you’ve secured significant funding, it is advisable to opt for a ready-made, comprehensive marketplace solution like Vendo, as recommended by someone who has charged for marketplace development for many years.
Back to the Food52 marketplace case study
The Food52 marketplace began as a small online food community in 2009. Today, it has grown into a strong platform with approximately 11 million monthly visitors across various platforms, including 1.7 million followers on Instagram.
Most of its income, about two-thirds, comes from its online store. Amanda Hesser, a former food editor at the New York Times, co-founded Food52 with Merrill Stubbs. Food52 aims to assist regular home cooks by offering professional articles and products created by users. They focus on recipes, food aesthetics, lifestyle, and emotional connections to food.
Food52 effectively combines content and shopping experiences. They have created a cookbook featuring recipes from their community members, fostering a sense of belonging. Additionally, they organize contests to engage their users.
Food52 ensures a user-friendly shopping experience on their website, avoiding pushy sales tactics. They recommend products that align with their brand.
The visual style of Food52, characterized by simple and appealing images, remains consistent throughout their content and shopping sections. Their website is designed to harmonize the shopping and food content experiences, rather than competing with larger e-commerce sites.
Approximately one-third of the products they sell are unique or specially crafted, giving the impression of artisanal quality rather than mass production. They also generate revenue from advertising and branded content, maintaining a high standard of quality. CEO Amanda Hesser collaborates with advertisers to ensure user satisfaction.
Food52 maintains a strong presence on social media, particularly Instagram, which complements their content. They partner with brands like Annie’s Mac & Cheese and Simply Organic Foods to create advertisements that seamlessly blend with their regular posts.
On Instagram, Food52 outperforms other food websites such as AllRecipes. They also utilize Pinterest to gather user preferences and enhance their content and shopping offerings.
How to emulate Food52 marketplace success?
To replicate Food52’s success, you should consider debuting your marketplace rapidly, within weeks rather than months. Evaluate how your products fit with your audience’s requirements, and fine-tune your methods of gaining customers based on real-world data. First, test the market before investing in its full-scale development.
Here’s what you’d be getting with a Vendo free trial:
- Book a marketplace demo call: We’ll set up your demo marketplace and populate it with products, so you could give it a try and start selling in 14 days
- Customize your Storefront: Use the drag & drop page builder or custom CSS
- Onboard Brands: Invite your brands or choose brands from our catalog
- Select Products: Curate products and collections manually or automate it
- Embed products: Make your content, newsletters, social media shoppable
- Get Paid: Get paid as soon as products are shipped by the brands
- End-to-end automation: Brands sync, fulfillment, payouts, invoicing, taxes
When you’ve tried all that and it works, start thinking about building your own, custom-made marketplace project based on Spree Commerce. First, by decoupling the storefront and going headless with Vendo marketplace API, and later with your own backend, if you decide you really need it. Just lift and shift the storefront.
Nobody has to know what’s under the hood, right?
