How I Started a Viral Food Video Empire
You know those weirdly captivating food videos in your feed? The ones that you tag your friends (or mom) in, pledging to make the bacon-weave s'mores or mac and cheese egg rolls ASAP? Joanna Saltz, 42, makes them. Saltz is the editorial director of Delish, a website dedicated to all things, well, delicious, from those wacky videos to the recipes behind them. Saltz grew up in a small town in New Jersey, about 35 minutes outside New York City, and planned to play viola professionally until she got into books, then magazines, and now digital. Here's how she became the queen of webz food.
My parents both worked in media - my mother was a newspaper reporter and my father was a newspaper art director, which is how they met. I thought I wanted to be a musician, and spent just about every hour of my teenage years playing viola. I enrolled at Trenton State College (now known as The College of New Jersey) on a viola scholarship, so yeah, I was all in on the viola.
Three years into my college career, I realized I was really unhappy and that I no longer wanted to be a musician. I ended up getting two jobs for that last year and a half, one of which was as a book copy editor. That book publishing company also owned several magazines around New York, and so when it was time to finally graduate, I was able to get time with HR and I was offered a job pretty quickly.
My first adult job was as an editorial assistant at Modern Bride magazine. I was thrilled! Some people write for magazines because they like telling a story. I write because I enjoy connecting with people. Girls would write in and be like, "I don’t want to have my sister-in-law in my wedding … what should I do?" or "I always dreamed of having an up do, but my hair is too short" and I thought it was so exhilarating that here I was, this 23-year-old nobody, helping women make decisions and coaching them on the most important day of their lives.
From Modern Bride, I spent a few years writing and editing at the wedding website The Knot, where I covered a lot of the same type of stories. Then I got the most fun job, as the deputy editor at Seventeen magazine.
I remember having to really sell myself to Atoosa Rubenstein, the editor-in-chief of Seventeen. She was like, "Why should I hire you?" And I recall saying that brides and teens are both vulnerable in the same way. They both feel like they don’t know what they’re doing, and they're both totally stressed about all these brand new experiences. I mean, there was a definite learning curve - suddenly all of the knowledge I’d gained about bouquets meant nothing, and I had a lot to learn about speaking to teens in a way that didn’t sound fake or dumb.
While at Seventeen, I met countless moms who were struggling to connect with their daughters and would ask my advice. Giving someone advice is a very powerful thing and I am, at my core and possibly to a fault, obsessed with helping people solve their problems.
But that was my work life. At home, I got really into cooking. In 2012, I was covering some food stories at Seventeen, but I was really binging on Food Network at home. I was so into all the channel’s personalities, but Ina Garten was my hero.
In fact, Ina Garten got me through a pretty serious bout of depression. When I delivered my first son and was home on maternity leave, I struggled with postpartum depression. Having a child is obviously super stressful and can be so isolating; the only thing that made me feel better was Ina. The first thing I did when I woke up was turn on Ina, and I would have her on TV in the background at all times. There was just something about her voice and mannerisms. I don’t know how to explain it! That was probably the beginning of my true food fixation.
Eventually I heard through the grapevine that the role of executive editor was opening up at Food Network Magazine, and so I knew I had to go for it. It was a lateral move for me, but I feel so strongly that every job should challenge you. This was an opportunity for me to grow.
I had no food editing experience when I applied. Truthfully, if they had been looking for a recipe editor, I couldn’t have done it. But the position was really about having fun ideas related to food. The hardest part of that transition was understanding how America cooks and eats. The convergence of how Americans want to cook, and what they actually cook, was a tough thing for me to learn. At the end of the day, people are all kinds of cooks: They want to make some fancy, complicated meal one night, then they want to eat Chipotle the other.
I loved my role at Food Network Magazine, but after three years or so I started wondering what was next. A friend sent me the listing for the site director role at Delish, another brand within Hearst Magazines, the company where I was working. I checked out the site, and I remember so well that it was January 6, 2015, and yet there were still Christmas recipes on the homepage. It looked terrible! No one was paying attention to this site.
I applied, though, because I still loved food and I was excited by the challenge of entering the digital world. I didn’t hear back for four weeks, and in that time I realized it was time for me to go and do something that was going to really break my brain. It was just this sudden understanding that I felt too comfortable and that it was time for a change. So on a whim, I sent this email to a woman I loved on HGTV, Joanna Gaines.
She was not nearly as famous then as she is now. Still, I was obsessed with her show. I sent her an email from my Gmail account saying, “Currently, I’m the executive editor of Food Network Mag, but I love you and I would love to help you establish an editorial presence somewhere. If you’re ever at a point where you want to do that, call me, I will literally come to Texas and work with you.” She wrote me back. She did!
Gaines was just like, "I would love to meet with you." And then she forwarded the email to somebody at HGTV asking, "This lady works at Food Network, do you know if this is real?" The email went from HGTV bigwig to HGTV bigwig to some Food Network exec to another and finally back down to my boss at Food Network. So my boss brings me into a meeting, closes the door, and hands me the email I had sent to Joanna Gaines. I wanted to die.
I had to dig my way out of this disaster. So I told my boss, "This isn’t about you. This is about me loving this person and thinking that she could be an amazing editorial brand." I don’t know how to explain it, but this was about more than Food Network. It was about needing to do what was in my control to grow and expand. Fast forward three years, and here we are: Joanna Gaines does have an amazing editorial brand. I never heard from her again. I am sure that she had no idea what had unfolded on the other side of her innocuous response.
That exact week, I heard back from Kate Lewis, the hiring manager for the Delish job, asking me to get drinks. I was still functioning under the impression that I was going to be fired because of the Joanna Gaines email.
I met Kate for drinks and I’m like, "Um, I want to start this conversation by apologizing. I would hate for that email to have reflected on my loyalty-," and she said, "I'm going to stop you right there. I’ve sent no fewer than a thousand of those emails." I almost want to start crying now thinking about it. It was such a relief! I thought I’d fucked everything up by doing this one stupid, selfish thing. So to be brought back down by someone telling me, "That wasn’t selfish, that was actually OK," it was just an incredible learning experience. And, well, she offered me the job at Delish.
When I arrived in February of 2015, I wasn’t just learning about a new job; I was learning digital, learning what a CMS and SEO are. We were averaging 1.9 million unique visitors a month, and had 100,000 Facebook followers. We had no Instagram, no YouTube, nothing. In fact, when we joined Instagram, we couldn’t even get @Delish. We had to get @Delishdotcom, which was so embarrassing. And this bumrush of work was coming off of the worst week of my life.
For me, the challenge was to figure out, How do we differentiate ourselves? "Basic bitch" food was starting to explode. I could see that. So I had to make that choice.
An example would be: instead of doing another round-up of "10 Best Pork Dinners," which is what they’d been doing, it was like… Beyoncé’s surprise album just dropped. Let’s do "10 moments when Beyoncé was sexy around food," showing funny memes of her eating pizza and stuff. That was the tectonic shift of voice and vision.
Frankly, it was just different than what other people were covering. Food Network Magazine was about famous chefs. Bon Appétit was very high-end. Eater was super restaurant-focused. Buzzfeed’s Tasty didn’t really exist at that point. Everybody had their niche and yet no one was doing the "Beyoncé being sexy with food" beat. We knew we could win there - by being the destination for people who don’t feel super comfortable in the kitchen, but like talking about Beyoncé and wait, maybe now they’re in the mood for a skillet pizza later tonight. That’s what we did.
Back in 2015, my deputy editor was making recipes and shooting them on her iPhone on the floor near the Good Housekeeping test kitchen, because that’s where the light was good. Now we have our own kitchen. We have multiple surfaces to shoot videos on, and a camera on its own stand, and it still seems so crazy and luxurious to me. Three years later, we’ve made thousands of videos and reach 30 million visitors a month.
The brand has so many places to go. I want to do events. We just finished a cookbook, which comes out this fall. We just pitched a TV pilot, and it may never see the light of day, but why not try? I love that, the boundless opportunity.
Our team is 18 people now, and I’ll say two things about them: Most of them didn’t come from digital, and almost none of them have culinary backgrounds. You just have to enjoy food. Don’t get me wrong, our recipes are tested, they’re legit, but there’s something about the freedom of not looking at food like a science that makes it so much more inviting and inclusionary. If I can do it, anyone can do it.
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