Working at America's Test Kitchen: Empower and Inspire Confidence in the Kitchen

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

Fran, thanks so much for joining us.

Fran Middleton, America's Test Kitchen 

Thanks. Hey, thanks for having me.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

I'm excited to talk to you because if people are not familiar with America's Test Kitchen they need to know about this amazing company. And I love the tagline on your careers page, home of perfect recipes and dream careers. So let's talk about America's Test Kitchen and what you guys do?

Fran Middleton, America's Test Kitchen

Yeah, sure. So, we are a media company that is in the home cooking space. We actually like to think of ourselves as an education company, because what we really do is we teach people how to become better home cooks, whether you're, you know, just starting off as a beginner that needs to learn how to fry an egg or somebody that's more advanced that wants to figure out how to host a dinner party for 20. We're really that organization that produces content to make you that better home cook. So we develop recipes. We also test kitchen equipment. So much like consumer reports that you know, tests cars, will test the best stand mixer will test cutting board, Chef knives will put it through its paces, and will recommend the best products for you as a home-cooked figure in your kitchen at home. That content is all produced in-house here in Boston, we have a 20,000 square foot studio, two television studios, photo studios, a big test kitchen, which is about 50,000 square feet. And we distribute all of that content across a variety of different channels. The biggest channel for us right now is traditional TV. So we have two television shows that are on PBS. And that does a really good job of driving the top of the funnel for us. It reaches about 4 million people every single week. So a lot of eyeballs there. We produce about 13 cookbooks on an annual basis across a variety of different cooking categories, Mediterranean diet, paleo, whatever cookie is, we have a couple of podcasts. We have two magazines. We have a kid's subscription box business, which is really you know, geared towards getting kids into cooking through the lens of steam and stem. We have an e-commerce business. And we have a digital subscription business so much like the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal where you have to pay to access their content behind a paywall. We're the same way you can access almost 30 years now of 8k content behind a paywall. So it's 10s of 1000s of recipes, a bunch of video content, a bunch of instructional content. So really, really rich history there for ATK.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

Now you're the company's chief digital officer, and you've been there for quite some time now. And so I thought it'd be helpful to talk about your background prior to joining the company. And a lot has obviously happened since you've joined. So to kind of give it that history.

Fran Middleton, America's Test Kitchen

Yeah, so I joined America's Test Kitchen, about seven years ago, really kind of by accident, I wasn't really in the market for a job, I'd actually just left another company here in Boston called RueLala, which I'm sure much of your audience is familiar with. And I was actually working with a handful of angel-backed startups is just kind of a consultant. And my, my goal was to eventually go work for one of these companies full time once they got their first real round of funding. But during that, that summer, I got a call from a mutual connection, that new Rue, new ATK. And I took the call, I'd never actually heard of the ATK brand. I told my wife about it and she's like, you're crazy and not go talk to them. But it was, for me it was a weird mix. Because when I looked at ATK and I did a little bit of research, I looked at them as kind of a traditional media company. And I was like, why do they need somebody like me. And as soon as I walked in the door, and I met with some people, the light bulb kind of turned off for me. And I was like, Oh, I get it now. They've got all this traditional content in print, whether it's in a magazine, or a book or television, and they need to figure out how to transform that into a digital business. And I was immediately sold. And that's kind of how I ended up at ATK about seven years ago, our business has grown tremendously. On the digital side, the digital business now accounts for more than 50% of the company's revenue. When I started, it was probably about 10% of the company revenue. So seeing some really exciting growth there.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

Wow, that's extraordinary. And yeah, it was definitely the right time to start going down that path of traditional media companies becoming more digital seven years ago. So talk about the company as a whole now as far as size number of employees, then you know, specific to your team, kind of what falls under your umbrella.

Fran Middleton, America's Test Kitchen 

Yeah, so ATK we're about 200 people, a little north of 200 people, everybody with the exception of a few folks that are located remotely now because of the pandemic. You know, the bulk of the staff is located here in Boston. Our office is located here in the seaport in downtown Boston. We're moving into that space about three years ago now. And that space is really designed for content production, in terms of the space that we have for video production photo production, and just general content production, we have a lab in there where we test kitchen equipment. So it's a great space, the space that we were in previously in Brookline, we've just, you know, completely outgrew. So the space has definitely helped us grow. You know, the 200 people, the bulk of those people are really split within a couple of groups, the digital group, which is the group that I run, and the content production group. So within digital, we're pretty much a self-contained standalone digital organization. We do everything in-house. We have product managers, we have developers, we have UX UI designers, QA, our data team is here in Boston, marketing, whether it's across paid media marketing, social media, marketing, organic, earned marketing, PR, that's all done here in house under the digital team. The second largest group, which reports to our chief creative officer, is the content production team. And that's really, the heart and soul of the business, I actually joke a lot that, you know, my job is actually easy, because I have to just take all that great content that the content team produces, and figure out how to how to publish it and monetize it digitally. But the content team is the other large group. And there are about 60 or so people within the company. So pretty good size, but a good size a manageable size too.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz   

very much. So there's lots of hiring going on at ATK. Which, based on everything you share, there are lots of different functions, lots of different roles. But you know, specific to your team, like what are the different types of positions that you're hiring for?

Fran Middleton, America's Test Kitchen

Yeah, we're hiring for positions all across digital. So marketing positions, we have a role for a director of brand marketing, which is probably the most senior marketing position that we're hiring for. And that role is really geared towards someone that's going to help us drive the top of the funnel, we've got a lot of really great channels that drive audience. And this person is really going to sit at the top of that and figure out how to grow that even larger than what we have today. We've got a lot of developer positions, which obviously in this market is a really hot commodity. But developers both across the front end and the back end, and we're totally open to where those developers work, they do not have to be located in Boston. As a matter of fact, our team of developers is mostly distributed across the country at this point, we only have a handful that is located in Boston. And that's been our model for five years or so now. QA engineers as well, product folks, I think we've got openings for three or four different product folks across different parts of the product. We operate three different brands, America's Test Kitchen, cooks illustrated, and cooks country, and each of those brands essentially has kind of their own product person, depending on the feature that we're building. So lots of product managers, lots of content people. So if there's anybody out there that has worked in a, you know, in a restaurant that wants to have a more civilized nine to five sort of lifestyle with benefits. ATK is a great place to work, you can still work in the kitchen, you can still cook, you can develop recipes, you can test recipes. And so we're hiring for a lot of those content producers as well. Our video team is also growing, we've seen a ton of success in distributing our video outside of traditional television. We've recently over the past 18 months month launched across a variety of streaming video platforms. So platforms like the Roku channel, or Pluto TV, or the built-in Samsung TVs. And that has been a huge success for us, not only in terms of driving that new revenue, but also driving that new audience. And we're gonna double down on that in the next year or so. And video production for us is going to really ramp up so people with digital video experience and production is another sort of key group that we're going to be hiring in the next year.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

And once someone does join the team at ATK, what's it like working there? What's the culture like?

Fran Middleton, America's Test Kitchen

I would say that the and this is what I like about it is that it's very entrepreneurial. Even though the company has been around for 30 years or so, it feels very much like a startup because of the work that we're doing digitally. A lot of sort of the successes that we've seen over the past few years have actually come out of that entrepreneurial spirit. So we've launched, you know, a podcast, which has won several awards. And that was basically a pitch that one of our video producers made to the executive team. She pulled us in a room one day and said, Hey, I think we should do a podcast. Here's the concept. Here's the cost, here's how much revenue we think you could generate. And within minutes It was approved and it's been one of our most successful initiatives over the past couple of years. So if you're somebody that wants to work for an established company that very much has that entrepreneurial startup feel ATK is definitely that Kind of a place.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz   

As you highlighted before, there's a lot of different options for people, the job markets are very active, which is a good thing, because that's what we want. But like why is now the ideal time to join America's Test Kitchen

Fran Middleton, America's Test Kitchen

ATK has always been a growing company since I've been there. But our growth and this is kind of a weird thing to say that the pandemic has been good for ATK but it has because a lot of people are at home and they and they want to learn how to cook and kind of expand their skills there. We're going to double down on growth in the next five years or so we recently got a pretty significant investment from our board to hire 52 people. So it's about a 25% growth over what we have today. And the Northstar that we're trying to chase is to really double our growth over the course of the next four to five years. And for me, I think for others, that's a really exciting proposition. And to be part of that to really double the business in that period of time. It's I think it's exciting for the right people.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz   

Well if you are interested in exploring opportunities at ATK, you need to go to their company page on VentureFizz which is venturefizz.com/atk. And talk about a perfect combination at a company where you have digital media, TV, and food sounds like a no-brainer to me. So make sure you go to their company page and check out all their job listings. Fran, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the great things happening at the company. 

Fran Middleton, America's Test Kitchen  

Thanks, Keith. 

Transcribed by https://otter.a