On Tuesday, Nine’s Good Food title lifted the lid on its biggest revamp in a decade, featuring 10 new columns, new features, and revamped localised reviews – and of course, enough recipes to have you dreaming of dinner.
Mediaweek spoke to Good Food editor Ardyn Bernoth about the relaunch and what it means for consumers and brands.
For consumers, it may seem like a sudden move, but with the shiny new website up and running, Bernoth says that the Good Food relaunch has been a long time coming.
“We’ve been working on this for quite a long time, it’s been a couple of years that this has been in the process. It’s the culmination of several years of work – so the timing, I must say, has worked out well.
“We do get feedback through our mastheads – the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald – that people now more than ever want a mix of stories available to them. There’s going to be a lot more food content on the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald because we’re just really seeing that this is what people want.”
A relaunch is a lot of work for anyone, and with the sheer amount of content that Good Food has in its back catalogue, Bernoth says that there’s been a lot of work going on behind the scenes.
“We’re a complicated website. We have three facets to what we do – there are the recipes, we’ve got 10,000 and they all had to be migrated into a new content management system. We also have our reviews, and then we have food news coverage. There was a lot of very production-heavy technical work behind the scenes.”
For Good Food readers, the freshen up of the site comes along with a number of new features to play around with, and make finding what’s for dinner even easier.
“It was a pretty old website, and they pretty quickly become in need of an overhaul, says Bernoth. “We have a much better search function in this relaunch, we have the ability to save recipes, we have more ability for our readers to connect with each other. On recipes, they can help each other out with tips and advice. You’ve just got to keep expanding your capabilities.”
In a list of columnists including Curtis Stone, Adam Liaw, and former MasterChef winner Emelia Jackson, one name that stands out for Bernoth is Nagi Maehashi of RecipeTin Eats fame, who has signed exclusively with Good Food for a new weekly recipe column and video.
Nagi Maehashi, Curtis Stone, and Adam Liaw
“She’s just so incredible. We’ve collaborated with Nagi for years. She’s done monthly recipes for us, she’ll write these recipes and shoot them for Good Food and they’re housed on our website and in our print section – but we’ve upped that now.
“I sat down with Nagi in December last year and said, can you do a special weekly column for us? She immediately said, ‘how about the SOS Series?’. It’s a weekly recipe, that will have four essential criteria – you can make them in under 30 minutes, for under $20, for four people, and they’ll have 12 ingredients or under. She really gets that budget is a huge thing this year, and people just want to be able to put food on the table for a reasonable amount of money. And my God, she’s the person to bring these recipes!”
From a commercial perspective, Bernoth says that the relaunch of Good Food offers brands and clients a wider reach that has the backing of the full Nine business.
“The spread of Good Food is bigger. The website has extended to Brisbane and WA, so it’s a much more national offering for our clients and partners. There’s integration into the masthead too, so the traffic will be pretty huge for the whole of the brand.
“Commercially, the whole brand will be just so much more elevated across all of Nine’s assets – for example, Nagi is doing an appearance on The Today Show on Tuesday for us. All of Nine is getting behind this brand, which is going to be a pretty exciting proposition for commercial spend.”