Why Erika Ayers Badan is turning Food52 into a media lab

How do you connect with an increasingly fractured audience? Erika Ayers Badan reveals the ups, downs, and lessons learned in her first year running the lifestyle brand Food52—a big pivot from her role as CEO of Barstool Sports. Her new podcast Work drops advice from her own career, plus hot takes—from generational differences in the office to her surprising insights for in-person work. Badan also shares how Food52 is finding its voice around politics, and navigating the current moment. 

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.

2025 has started with so much volatility. A lot of business leaders are on their heels wondering how to respond to the array of changes issuing from the Trump White House. For you, do you have a philosophy about how to respond? How much do you react to the daily news? How much can you ignore it?

It’s funny, when the first announcements around the tariffs came out, it was on a Saturday. I was really freaked out. I called an emergency meeting on a Sunday. And that’s become the new normal, where there’s a lot of whiplash, there’s a lot of pontification, there’s a lot of speculation. And really, what I’ve gotten to is that you can see what’s happening in the Trump administration is going to be chaotic, and I think CEOs being able to stay the course and set their own pace is probably the best course. Being in a reactionary mode is dangerous in general, and it feels especially dangerous right now.

I sometimes think about the role of business and business leaders as part of the checks and balances in American culture. And I don’t know whether you think about that at all or whether you think something like, “Listen, your job is to run the business and that’s what you do and there’s not another mission beyond that.”

Government used to regulate business. Now what you’re seeing is entrepreneurs are reshaping the government. Everything is topsy-turvy. I think this is one of the fundamental questions we’re going to have right now. We’re clearly entering an era where there will be less regulation, so will brands police themselves? How’s that going to work? Are we just going to pendulum swing every four years? So I don’t have any good answers for you, Bob, but I also think about it.

A lot of CEOs are uneasy about being candid in public. What’s the value of that candor, and how does it flow back to Food52’s business, or is it just about connection?

I think candor is important in general, and I think consumers are looking for the story behind the story. And this show is a way for me to do a couple things. One is I’m trying to experiment and model out how shows could and should be launched, produced, clipped, cut, managed, and I’m dogfooding it on myself. So if you want to know, my real intention is to be able to create other formats that look like this that are about home and lifestyle and food, and I’m using this as a template. I’m realtime creating a template that I can then give to other people here. I’ve not really talked about that, but that is my intention.

So for example, we have two really, really phenomenally talented test kitchen chefs. I believe that they both should have shows where they’re showing not only the art and their craft, but also talking about how they feel about it and what they learned about it and what inspires them and how they got there. 

So that’s one way it helps Food52. And then the second is a connection point. One thing I really learned at Barstool was, unwittingly or unknowingly, I created a community of really professional women, like I talked about, who are looking to other professional women to relate to, to be informed by, to ask advice from. And this is a way for me to keep current with that community who ultimately I think will help inform what content this company creates, what products we develop, and how we think about our go-to-market positioning.

On your podcast, you drop a lot of hot takes about work, and you’ve said that you’re mostly in favor of in-person office work and also that people are becoming less resilient in the workplace. And I wondered whether those two things are related or are they separate?

Great question. I am a fan of in-person work. I don’t know that all businesses will go back to five days a week in the office. I think great start-ups will, in the most part, require people to be together in a way that is hands-on and in person in some capacity. And as it relates to resilience, I think there’s a whole bunch of things that are leading into the resilience question. 

One is how kids are being raised and how much risk we expose people to. When you look at time spent from elementary school kids through college kids, you’re never bored anymore. You’re not out. You’re not left to your own devices. You’re not messing up and getting in trouble the way at least I got in trouble when I was in high school and college. And it’s because there’s a safer, more interesting option on your phone. 

And as a result, when you are forced into the real world, a lot is required of you, and you have to make unstructured time into something, and you have to propel yourself into new places. It can be very, very, very difficult. And so I think that’s contributing to it.

And then I think working over Zoom and in the comfort of your home—and I don’t think working from home is comfortable. I think actually working from home is pretty hard. It’s easier to tune out or feel more distance and feel less connected.

I often think when we go to school, a lot of the things we learn are not the school work, but how to engage with other people. And the same thing happens when you go into a workplace: You learn how to work with a group of people in a different way.

Definitely. You learn what happens when people don’t like you at work. You don’t experience that when you work from home. What are the power dynamics? Who’s the hierarchy? 

I remember getting my first job at Microsoft, and I was very enamored and terrified of the execs there, and I just watched them all the time. I couldn’t get enough. I just wanted to watch what they wore, what they ate, what they did, how they talked to one another, how they led their people, how they dealt with failure.

And I got a whole tuition just sitting in a room. If you’re on a Zoom call, you’re not getting the full picture. There’s no meeting after the meeting. There’s no hallway conversation. Then I think that’s the osmosis that can really feed you at work.

That unstructured serendipity that is part of a workplace, which is not always efficient but can be effective.

100%. You can waste a lot of time at work. The days I really need to get a lot of work done, I don’t go to the office because the commute takes a long time, the chit-chat takes a long time, but it is really important because you learn the dynamics of a place, and that’s really where the fabric and culture can be developed.