The Guardian moves closer to being a reader-supported business as it launches new cooking app

Or to put it another way, Feast will keep driving the publisher’s commercial push toward direct reader revenue models, so it won’t have to rely solely on ad revenue.

Feast, which is curated by the publisher’s food editorial team that’s headed up by Tim Lusher (head of food), was initially released as a beta test in January, followed by iOS and Android versions which launched in April and June, respectively. Now it’s available worldwide.

“The vision was to create an app which housed our amazing tried and tested recipes from our galaxy of star chefs, which are easily searchable, based on the ingredients you have, or any dietary requirements, and are easy to cook with.”

Feast uses machine learning and AI to pull out the step-by-step instructions from the Guardian’s 30,000 archive of recipes to ensure they’re easy to access and follow. While Wynn remained closed lipped regarding the “exciting roadmap of ideas” the team has in store for the app, she did say that it currently includes features such as tapping the screen with your knuckle to move to the next instruction (to avoid wet and floury fingers on your phone or tablet), cook mode (to prevent screens from going blank while cooking), along with a cups calculator (which helps when needing to convert grams to cups when weighing), as well as a foods dictionary.

“The app has amazing global reach,” added Wynn. “The Guardian is so global now, and 70% of our readers are outside of the U.K., which is why we’ve taken a lot of care by curating the homepage so it’s based on people’s locations, the seasons and so forth.”

The app is being used to fuel that proposition in two ways: to provide a compelling offering encouraging readers to support the Guardian more financially, while also reaching new audiences.

“We [The Guardian] are renowned for our incredible news coverage, but we’re so much more than that,” said Wynn. “Feast really allows us to extend the audience who are going to be engaged and willing to support us. People will be interested and engaged with a brilliant recipe and food app, who might not potentially want to support us through our existing offering.”

The app treads a similar well-trodden path by the likes of New York Times, which boasts a weekly/monthly subscription model for all access to The Times. The publisher launched its own Cooking app back in 2014 as an iPad app, which has since evolved to include an Android version and costs $6 per month, as a way to lean more into subscription revenue, and less on advertising.

So far, subscribers who use the NYT Cooking app have more than tripled in the past four years.

The Guardian, by comparison, offers monthly/annual subscriptions across three tiers: support (exclusive weekly newsletter), all-access digital (ad-free with app access), and digital/print (includes magazine delivery). Readers can also donate after each article. The premium Feast app can be accessed initially using a 14-day trial, followed by a monthly subscription cost of £2.99 ($3.99).

“The Guardian has been quite successful focusing on a strategy that relies on getting readers to donate, largely by appealing to their feelings about the importance of journalism and their coverage of issues critical to public interests,” said Max Willens, senior analyst at eMarketer. “That is very different from charging people monthly fees to access recipes, many of which may not be that different from what a user can find for free, or may be paying for already via The New York Times, or Condé Nast, or Cook’s Illustrated.”

While Wynn didn’t share exact figures, she did say that the Guardian’s supporter base is “well in excess of a million”, and 70% of the brand’s readers are engaged in its food content. The vague outline gives some explanation as to why the publisher is confident it will see mass adoption of the app to the point where it becomes a “very significant part” of its revenues going forward. 

“I think the acid test when you have a free trial period is, how many of those free trials then go on to pay? And those conversion rates have been exceptionally strong, they’ve beat our expectations internally,” she said, though she didn’t divulge any figures or percentages.

Editor’s note. this story was updated to clarify that the Guardian is not trying to replace its ads business with a reader-funded one.