A Year After Barstool Sports, CEO Erika Ayers Badan Is Now Stirring The Pot At Food52

Erika Ayers Badan has worked for some of the most recognizable brands in media and technology, including Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo.

Now, Ayers Badan is, in some ways, deploying a modified playbook she wrote at Barstool Sports, a sports, media and comedy brand she led for nearly eight years before joining cooking, lifestyle and homeware company Food52 last April as its chief executive officer.

“I felt like there was a really big gap, the same way I saw the gap when I went to Barstool Sports,” she told me during a video interview in June. “At Barstool, it was about creating something from nothing. They had a hugely loyal and rabid audience, but we exploded it. And the difference for Food52 and Schoolhouse was really reshaping it versus creating it.”

Ayers Badan sees a future at Food52 similar to the business she built at Barstool Sports, one centered around storytelling, commerce, community, audience and talent.

She referred to year one at Food52 as a “reshaping, reprioritizing and rejiggering” period, while she expects year two to be a foundational year where producing creative content, developing new franchises and introducing more personality-driven programming is central to the brand’s strategy.

“I’m really trying to build, in the same way I built a flywheel at Barstool, is to build that here at Food52 with a different audience around a different set of products with different types of stories, but distributed the same way — on Tiktok, Instagram, YouTube and in live events,” she said.

From Ayers Badan’s tenure at Barstool Sports, developing sports and entertainment franchises, like the top sports podcast “Pardon My Take” and entertainment and pop culture brand “Chicks in the Office,” among others, were core tenants to the overall success of the sports company. She’s trying to accomplish a similar feat at Food52.

For example, in early 2025, the brand launched the Food52 Hotline where people can ask resident experts through the company website and social media platforms about problems they’re experiencing in the kitchen.

Through text and video formats — and an upcoming podcast — Food52 provides answers and solutions, as well as highlights brand recipes and products. In the future, Ayers Badan is also considering further Hotline franchise extensions with possibly live events and a Thanksgiving telethon where Food52 chefs answer last-minute food-related questions.

Weeks ago, Food52 also launched a similar concept with Schoolhouse, a manufacturer of lighting and lifestyle goods company that was acquired in 2021.

“We will answer these same questions in a way that’s entertaining, in a way that’s relatable and approachable, in a way that’s authentic and in a way that showcases the best of what we have to offer, not as an ad, but just as part of what we’re doing,” Ayers Badan said.

Her focus for this year, in part, is also around finding the next crop of creators in the food, home, design and lifestyle sectors, and imagining how they appear across video, social media and other distribution platforms, including the newsletter provider Substack.

“If someone is an expert on color design or someone is an expert on trending restaurants in New York City, I’m interested in people who care and are rabid about it,” she said. “There’s where we are at. What does this look like on video? How would it appear in a podcast? What does this look like as a live event? What does this look like in the comments section?”

In March, the company also debuted its ReWork program, a new initiative designed to engage at-home Moms who are looking for freelance and part-time opportunities to create content for both Food52 and Schoolhouse.

Meanwhile, Ayers Badan highlighted that Food52 will soon launch about 10 different content series later this summer and fall, all designed to entertain and inform an audience across food, home and lifestyle. Though she didn’t provide many specifics, Ayers Badan teased a possible rundown-style show — i.e., what’s happening today and what’s trending across lifestyle and home — that may originate from the company’s test kitchen space at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Food52 is also currently in the process of launching a show around Tiara Bennett, who is a chef and owner of a New York City bakery called The Pastry Box.

She provided another example. Months ago, the international design magazine Architectural Digest provided readers with an all-access look, via text, audio and video, at the home of actress Jennifer Garner. What if Food52 could do something similar but for a different audience?

“There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of women and people who have beautiful homes, beautiful apartments and unique spaces all over this country. What if we tell those stories?” she said. “I’m really interested in looking past perfection and looking through the establishment. What the Internet has done is eaten the middle man, and it has democratized expression. It has created so much opportunity. I’m excited about this concept of where people live, how people live, to find voices in the crowd that can do that right and to then pair them with the right production and the right product.”

She said the company will host an UpFront event this fall to sell its new series as well as other content and media to potential advertisers and brand partners.

Food52 expects to double its media business year-over-year in terms of overall revenue and audience size, Ayers Badan noted. Currently, the brand’s commerce and trade business — where the brand works with interior designers, architects and boutique hotel owners to decorate their respective spaces — are the two dominant streams of revenue, according to Ayers Badan, but she said she expects the advertising business to also grow “substantially” in the future. There’s also early-stage talks about how Food52 may host ticketed live events with food and lifestyle creators and professionals.

“I really believe part of the reason that Barstool Sports was so captivating is we had big, beautiful personalities like [founder Dave Portnoy],” she said. “I can’t wait to find the Dave Portnoy of home at Food52. They’re out there.”