From Institution to Individual: Food Fix’s Immediate Success
By: Christiana Sciaudone
Helena Bottemiller Evich landed her first paying subscriber within hours of hitting send on her first newsletter as an independent journalist in 2022. It was a group subscription for Food Fix at a cost of $1,800 a year for six seats. Evich told A Media Operator:
Right out of the gate, I had meaningful revenue. I would not have guessed that I would quit a great job at a great publication and do something like this, so to do that and then to have it work is really exciting, and I hope that it’s a model for other journalists.
The award-winning writer had just left Politico after nine years covering food policy. She had been ready to move on but wasn’t sure what her next step would be considering that the beat isn’t exactly a hot topic and almost no outlet covers food as such. She thought of trying to sway The New York Times or Washington Post into creating the role and hiring her, and then she thought of how else she could possibly continue covering food policy and create a business around it. She used Politico’s two-pronged approach catering to a B2C audience and a B2B—and paying—audience, and set off on her own.
While Evich isn’t ready to divulge subscriber or revenue numbers, she did say she’s making more than she did as a very well-paid senior policy reporter at Politico, and has a number of part-time staffers including a stable of freelancers who covered her very recent four-month maternity leave (during which time the newsletter went dark for a full month to nary a single complaint). It’s a good thing it worked out, too, since she had no plan B. As Evich explained:
There is a lot of opportunity for growth. I think I have not decided exactly what that looks like yet, but there is a lot of potential, because I am 100% organic growth right now. My paid conversion rates are really high. I’m converting almost 10% of my free list, which is really great. And my open rates are really high on my emails, averaging over 55%.
Her emails often have open rates of over 80% as she provides original content that isn’t being replicated anywhere else despite the industry totaling somewhere between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. In fact, Evich argues food policy isn’t a niche topic by any means, and any time a big story on the beat (like the recent Boar’s Head listeria outbreak) runs in mainstream media, it becomes one of the most-read pieces.
Evich is spending almost nothing on marketing and has built a loyal audience comprising both free and paid readers. She is well aware of the risk of building a brand around one person, which is why she named it Food Fix, and she’s also wary of the future of content distribution. Right now, email, archaic as it may be, is the best option to reach readers, but that could easily be displaced by new technology that has yet to be invented.
Evich is also aware that she is leaving money on the table by not having ads on her newsletters, but many of those interested want to run policy advertising and she doesn’t want any risk of perceived conflict of interest.
“I’m still trying to figure out what to do next. But there’s absolutely a path to having a team,” Evich said. She has been approached by potential buyers, but she’s not interested in selling and while she declined to identify them, she did say that “it really confirmed to me that this institutions to individuals shift is happening in a big way. Institutions are scrambling to figure this out.”
The entrepreneur is currently very, very happy to be doing her own thing, able to experiment where bigger players may be less willing to do so. One of the most immediate and best aspects of going out on her own has been how much more data she has about what her audience reads and engages with. At Politico, she had almost no access to that kind of information.
“Having access to that does help me focus on what topics I know are resonating. It doesn’t mean I won’t cover other issues, but I’ve learned a few things that have helped me focus on what is what people are engaging with,” Evich said.
As an example, she found that coverage of the infant formula crisis really only resonates with a slim segment of readers. That doesn’t mean she won’t cover it, but it helps her discern what warrants her limited time and resources. “I was not anticipating how helpful that would be. I didn’t know what I was missing, right?”
So far, her audience has come largely from word of mouth and social media, and they clearly value the personal connection to Evich. She gets far more reader emails now than she ever got at Politico, despite having a notably smaller readership overall.
“There’s something much more personal about sending an email directly to each of you,” she wrote in a recent post celebrating two years of the newsletter’s existence. “I also now occasionally use the first person in my writing, something I almost never did at Politico, which allows me to include more analysis and informal insight than one can when sticking to the conventions of news writing. This is also part of a broader trend in media, as audience shifts from institutions towards individuals – this isn’t necessarily always good, but it’s a natural consequence of the media environment splintering and decentralizing.”
Her paid audience includes people who work in the food space, from congressional staff to FDA and USDA employees, senior leaders at food companies, lawyers, food tech startups and more. School nurses or concerned parents are among those who subscribe to the free version.
“The trick with the free version is that it has to be original and interesting enough to be worth the open for the paid audience, but also approachable and interesting enough for a lay audience,” Evich said. “And this is actually where a lot of magic happens, because there is not a lot of substantive coverage of these issues that is also consumer friendly.”
Given that it’s not a regular beat at mainstream news outlets, the floor is hers and hers alone, for the most part.
“When I have a free reader sign up for Food Fix, I find that they’re very engaged because it’s content they can’t find anywhere else, and they probably have some personal interest in this,” she said. That unique content is key, and Evich sees white space everywhere just waiting for a journalist to jump on board—though tech and finance as beats are well-saturated by now.
“I really do hope that more journalists consider this as a viable path if they want to cover a topic long term,” she said. “It’s not going to replace national outlets, but I think there is a model here that can really be replicated.”
