CookUnity, a longtime advertising partner of the channel, will begin selling four Babish-designed dishes in the New York tri-state area, with expansion to Chicago and Los Angeles planned in the coming months. Rea developed each recipe himself and worked with the company’s test kitchens to make them scalable. The eventual lineup will rotate between 10 mainstays and five seasonal items.
The partnership is a natural extension for a culinary creator whose audiences routinely watch him prepare dishes that they, up until now, have been unable to eat themselves. Additionally, many of his recipes, such as his pot roast and fried chicken, are too involved for most home cooks to replicate, making them a prime candidate for a meal-delivery option.
Babish declined to offer financial specifics of the deal, except to say that he is paid per each meal sold.
The podcast, which premiered May 25 and runs every other week, is a long-form interview show in which guests including William H. Macy and Alton Brown discuss their relationships with food.
Vox provides back-end support while Rea retains creative control, he said. The first season is set for 26 episodes. The break-up of Vox Media, which was recently sold in two tranches to Lupa Systems and Penske Media Company, did not affect Rea’s decision to partner with the company, he added.
Rea, who attended film school and spent seven years in post-production before launching the channel, said the broader expansion is rooted in a creative ambition that predates YouTube.
He pointed to the trajectory of creators like Kane Parsons, the Backrooms filmmaker now developing the project with A24, as a model for what comes next. A short film Rea has been writing for a decade, a thriller about an entity that wakes up in a different person each day, goes into production this summer.
“I’ve divorced myself from the business side of things so I could focus on the creative,” Rea said. “I don’t have that Martha Stewart gene in me.”
