• by Sara Guaglione , October 22, 2019

Flipboard has created a new destination dedicated to food on its content aggregation platform.

Launching today, The Tastiest is a mixture of content from publishers curated by Flipboard’s own team, as well as content from publisher partners that will be highlighted in the feed.

The first three publishers to work with Flipboard on The Tastiest are Eater, Chowhound and Food52. 

“Recipes and food stories are the most curated and most shared content type on Flipboard,” Flipboard curator Mia Quagliarello wrote in a blog post announcing the destination.

“We wanted to elevate the discovery of this great content,” and get users to continue sharing, Marci McCue, CMO of Flipboard, told Publishers Daily.

Flipboard aggregates digital content and allows users to create their own magazine-like packages. The new vertical will spotlight feeds like "The Best of Chili" by Chowhound and "Table For One" by Food52's Eric Kim.

The packages are exclusively created for Flipboard.

The Tastiest will come out twice a week, and have four sections. The first is the “Recipe of the Day.” The second will feature three-to-five stories from a publisher partner and resemble a “publisher takeover of the franchise,” McCue said.

The third section will feature food videos. The fourth will spotlight curated food content created by other publishers and journalists on Flipboard, to “build presence” with the Flipboard audience, McCue said. Flipboard has 150 million users.

Flipboard is also testing a fifth section: “Shop.”

Terri Ciccone, audience development manager at Eater, said the goal of the partnership is to “increase engagement, increase traffic, and more flips and comments” around Eater content on the Flipboard platform.

Eater created "magazines" for the 24 cities it covers, with feeds that automatically update with relevant content. It also created feeds around specific themes, such as "Filipino Food in America" to celebrate Filipino Heritage Month.

It’s a good way to “repurpose old content that is relevant and make it fresh again,” Ciccone said. 

Eater, like the other publisher partners on The Tastiest, will collaborate with Flipboard to highlight content that is performing well or inform them about relevant content “coming down the pipeline” that would be a good fit for the feed, Ciccone said.

Flipboard has over 30 food-focused publisher partners, including The Washington Post and Taste of Home. Going forward, it will spotlight content from those publishers in The Tastiest, too.

A user reading about Thanksgiving recipes in The Tastiest could be served an offer to buy a turkey baster, for example. Flipboard will test engagement, click-through rates and other conversion rates in this section before offering it as a revenue-driving option for publishers, McCue said.

Flipboard is introducing a new set of alerts sent to users who follow food topics like "food and dining," "recipes" and "cooking." The Tastiest will notify users that follow the franchise "when there's something that shouldn't be missed," Quagliarello wrote.

A version of the vertical will also be delivered to users' inboxes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Flipboard is offering more food topics to choose from during the setup of an account as well.

Last year, Flipboard debuted its first foray into dedicated franchises with a "Tech" vertical. It then launched five more verticals that got their own brand design, including The Daily Edition, 10 for Today, Vote 2018, The Culturist and The Insight, for those in the ad and media industries.