Foodie publisher’s online marketplace is the secret sauce for revenues

Joe Spector founded The Local Palate, the food culture magazine of the South, in Charleston, South Carolina 13 years ago without any media experience .

Today, it’s a national media company boasting an estimated $5 + million in revenues. The secret sauce involves continual innovation that expanded into the niche to identify and test opportunities for new revenues. 

Like many niche publishers he brought fresh ideas from a background in a different industry, and closed the distance with an entrepreneurial approach.

How he did it

“People sometimes think we’re a local brand, but this is a national consumer vertical,” Spector said. 

While based in North Carolina, the magazine covers Southern cuisine. The magazine has in effect helped turned the region’s food into a national brand.                                                                                    

In short, the media can find a regional audience for in-person events, and a national audience for its advertisers and reader-driven revenues.

Instead of breaking news, he focuses on the culture, providing recipes, Q&A’s with well-known chefs, cookbook reviews, James Beard award nominees, and restaurant openings, with plenty of video and audio.

To find advertisers, he makes plenty of use of LinkedIn sales navigator.

Scaling up also meant pushing the workload onto a team that includes full time offshore contractors.

One  of them was so good, and underpaid by an offshore outsourcing firm, that Spector bought out his contract.  In the meantime, Spector continually iterated new ways to connect and monetize audiences and advertisers, using open source plug-ins and customizing his own software.

The e-commerce store 

While advertising and subscriptions are the build of revenues, going deep into the niche meant finding and developing software to support multiple niches.

After so many small retailers closed during the pandemic, Spector’s feel for merchandising resurfaced. He used Shopify to launch an e-commerce marketplace in 2023.

Many of the vendors had taken a hit during the pandemic and were happy to have an additional outlet for sales. Today recipes and stories contain links to products in the store, so if readers get interested in a dish, the ingredients are “only a click away,” Spector said. 

“Since we are a media company we are in the fortunate situation that we can drive traffic to our website  to sell products.” 

A recipe for Frogmore Stew, below, includes a link to a sausage the reader can click to buy hard-to-find ingredients then and there.

The Local Palate’s online store, like the website, is built on Shopify, with some extra plug-ins and proprietary software.

Business arrangements with vendors vary; some pay a revenue share, while others sell the product to him outright at wholesale prices. Fulfillment for the store’s sales is done at The Local Palate office or by the vendor. 

Our take: If it sounds little like affiliate sales, it is, only with a better return and no third party marketplace taking a cut. He can also show his advertisers concrete proof the brand boost, and gather data on what his audience craves.

The latest addition to the online marketplace are gift boxes – themed packages of products sold direct to consumers and promoted by the website and online store.

Because these are more complex to package and ship, Spector use a separate fulfillment house, Sheridan, owned by the company that prints his magazines.

One of the unique feature of the revenue models used by The Local Palate  is how well Spector has designed reader-revenue  offers to work together. Subscriptions not only drive product sales, but the store helps drive subscriptions.

Subscriptions & memberships

If a user adds something to a cart in the store, an “add to cart” button prompts the user add a subscription, discounted by the amount of their purchase. 

For example, with a $5 fried chicken rub added to the cart, the user gets  a prompt to buy the $50 subscription to the magazine for $45.  “It’s really a great deal,” Spector said. 

At check out, there another prompt,  “You are $45 away from a free 1 year subscription.” The carousel in-line banner shows a 2 and 3-year version. 

Conversely, users who buy subscription first get 10% off the marketplace, and are by default opted-in to a bi-weekly newsletter, which drives traffic back to the content and store.

The Cookbook Club 

A recent addition to reader revenues is a premium membership, “The Cookbook Club.” Users recieve a cookbook a year, access to author events and an additional discount in the marketplace: The marketplace is  15% off, an extra 30% above a regular subscriber discout, for a CookBook Club member. 

Members can join at the Apprentice, Sous Chef, or Chef de Cuisine levels, with the top two tiers priced at $150 and $175 a year.

“90% opted in at the highest price point,” Spector said.

“The cookbooks are also in the marketplace. It all ties into the brand.”  

Events

The magazine also hosts food-related in-person events, with  100 to 1000 participants in key cities throughout the South and beyond, along with partnering with other events.

 There’s the Whiskey after Dark tasting,  a Low Country Oyster Festival, and  Charleston Wine+ Food 2025 (left) promoted by the magazine and website. 

The second annual Jackson, Mississippi-based JXN Food & Wine Festival (JXNFW) in March, 2025 grew from one to two days in its second year.

VIP tickets for go for $170 and general admission tickets for $90. The main event for all ticket holders includes tastings, cooking demonstrations, and live music by DJ Java at the Mississippi Museum of Art.

But there are also premium tickets.

Guest chefs, including Michelle Wallace from Bravo’s Top Chef,  host intimate dinners.

Finally, for an extra $225, attendees can attend the four-course dinner prepared by  Chef Chair Nick Wallace joins chefs from around the country at The Hen & Egg at the end of the event.

The secret sauce for in zero to millions in one niche

“Covid changed a lot. But because of what we built and how we go about it, we were able to benefit in a bigger way, as people went away (from physical retail),” he said. “People asked what makes you think you can succeed? What choice did I have?” Spector said. 

Clearly, he is also a talented team builder.

“Everyone here is very passionate, on board, and vested in where we are.”

Key takeaways

Here are some key takeaways from Local Palate’s successful  “going deeper into the niche” revenue model:

• There may be more reader revenue available.  Niche pubs have an unused, unfair advantage in building marketplaces.
• Marketplaces add critical data points to show advertisers brand lift, and know what readers crave
• Shopify may win over other plug-in options.  It works on WP, and it is easier to build subscriptions into a merchandise cart, than the other way around.
• A commitment to software development pays off for creative entrepreneurs. The exact mix of plug-ins and customizations would probably be unavailable on a conventional third party CMS designed to work for hundreds of publishers.
• The founder does not need a background in media. We are finding an increasing number of niche publisher who are successful because they had other backgrounds, along with a willingness to learn and to try new things.

Many thanks to publisher Joe Spector for sharing how he created a full plate of revenues.