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Matt Rodbard is the founder and editor in chief of the food media brand Taste, as well as the cohost of its podcast, This is Taste. The outlet launched in 2017 as an in-house division of Crown Publishing, itself an imprint of the publishing firm Penguin Random House. Originally conceived as a content marketing vehicle for the cookbooks published by Crown, Taste began monetizing its own content at the end of 2022.
The Taste newsletter now has 250,000 subscribers, while the podcast generates over 100,000 downloads a month. The one-man operation is on pace to break seven figures in revenue by the end of the year, in part due to an innovative commercial product in which brands invite Taste to explore the stories behind their companies.
This interview has been edited.
Mark Stenberg: Taste has a unique model, given that it was launched as a division inside of a book publishing imprint. How did that come about?
Matt Rodbard: Crown wanted to market its cookbooks, but they realized that they couldn’t just copy and paste marketing scripts and call it a day. I saw a huge opportunity to tell the stories of the authors through editorial, and it grew from there.
Mark: Taste originally started as text-based reporting, but is now known primarily for its podcast. How did that transition happen?
Matt: We are very committed to text. We pay freelancers and publish a feature per week, although that is down from five a week. In 2018 we launched the podcast, ramped up after the pandemic, and in 2023 hit our three-times-a-week cadence. We estimate that we get around 2.5 million listening minutes a month, so while we are not the biggest podcast, I would say we are the one people in food want to be on the most.
Mark: What distinguishes This is Taste from other food podcasts?
Matt: A lot of people assume a food podcast is when someone calls in to talk about nutritional yeast. That is boring. We are a conversational show about food culture, which is different from cooking. Recently we’ve had on New York Times’ food writer Luke Fortney, who touched on the rotisserie chicken inflation debate, Austin chef and cookbook author Fermin Nunez, and food venture capitalist Elly Truesdell. We just cut an episode with Jess Shadbolt, the chef behind the buzzy New York restaurant Dean’s.
Mark: Lately you have been experimenting with a commercial format, in which a food brand sponsors an entire podcast. How does that work?
Matt: Food for us is about storytelling, and many food brands have amazing stories. I just got back from a trip to Spain where we shot a lot of content related to some household names in the tinned fish space. CPG brands and tourism boards need this nuance because shelves are saturated and a large part of what they are selling is their identity. We clearly label these as sponsored, but the listener reception has been overwhelmingly positive.
