About Taste.com.au Magazine

Taste.com.au Magazine

Taste.com.au Magazine is the print and digital magazine spin-off of taste.com.au, Australia's leading food website. Launched in September 2013 by News Corp Australia's magazine division NewsLifeMedia, it reversed the usual publishing order — a magazine created from a website rather than the other way around — and became one of the most successful Australian magazine launches of its decade. Published monthly from Sydney, it extends the taste.com.au brand's service journalism — recipes and practical cooking guidance — into print and app editions, featuring contributions from some of Australia's best-known food personalities.

Overview

The magazine is a monthly food title built on the taste.com.au platform, which in the early 2010s had become Australia's number-one food website. Its editorial formula is service journalism: recipes that answer the reader's daily question of what to cook, presented with the show-stopping food photography the title became known for, plus features built around the brand's stable of food contributors — names including Manu Feildel, Matt Preston and Marion Grasby have featured in the magazine's pages and app. The brand's own description emphasises recipes that are a joy to make and eat, from quick healthy midweek meals to indulgent food for sharing.

The magazine is published by News Corp Australia (through the former NewsLifeMedia division) and distributed nationally through newsagents and supermarkets — at launch it secured ranging in more than 7,000 outlets including front-of-store positions at Coles and Woolworths — as well as by subscription and through the taste.com.au Magazine app on iOS and Android. The app, which carries the magazine's content digitally with single-issue sales and subscriptions, was updated as recently as September 2026, indicating the brand's continued active publication.

History

Taste.com.au began as a recipe website and grew rapidly in the late 2000s and early 2010s to become the country's dominant online food destination. By 2013 NewsLifeMedia saw an opportunity to reverse-publish the brand: to create a print magazine from a digital property, defying the industry trend of print titles scrambling to build digital audiences. The first issue went on sale nationally in September 2013, backed by a launch marketing campaign reported at around $3 million — spanning television commercials, point-of-sale displays and the unprecedented supermarket ranging that put the debut issue in front of shoppers at Coles and Woolworths checkouts.

The launch was an immediate commercial success. Advertising inventory for the first issue sold out more than a week before it went to print, and the publisher increased the print run from a budgeted 160,000 to 200,000 copies to meet retail demand. NewsLifeMedia's group publisher of food brands, Fiona Nilsson, said at the time that research had shown 84 per cent of taste.com.au readers would buy a magazine spin-off — and the launch validated the bet.

Within two years the title had established itself as one of the country's top-selling magazines. By its second birthday in September 2015, Taste.com.au Magazine had landed in the Top 20 most-read titles in Australia and the Top 20 biggest-selling titles, lifting circulation by almost one per cent in defiance of the industry's broader print decline. Editor-in-chief Brodee Myers-Cooke, who led the brand across print and digital, told Mediaweek the title had built a loyal audience, with print subscriptions up 13 per cent year-on-year and the brand's cookbooks performing strongly.

Industry recognition followed. At the Australian Magazine Awards the title won magazine brand of the year and food and entertainment magazine of the year, with judges praising it as a trusted and credible brand that had become readers' go-to resource for recipes. The awards capped a remarkable run for a title that had not existed three years earlier.

Editorial approach

The magazine's editorial identity was shaped by Myers-Cooke's conception of the brand as service journalism. Where traditional food magazines balanced recipes with lifestyle features, travel and celebrity content, Taste.com.au Magazine kept the focus tight: recipes, cooking guidance and the contributors readers already knew from the website and television. The cover strategy — big, arresting food photography designed to stop shoppers in supermarket aisles — was cited by the editor as central to the title's newsstand performance in an era when food imagery was ubiquitous online.

The contributor stable gave the magazine star power without the cost of a large staff: well-known food media personalities fronted recipe features and columns, lending their audiences to the masthead. The brand's cookbooks extended the same logic — the magazine's recipe development engine producing books that sold strongly through the same supermarket channels.

The publisher

NewsLifeMedia was News Corp Australia's magazine division, publisher of titles including Donna Hay, Delicious, Super Food Ideas, Vogue Australia and Gourmet Traveller alongside Taste.com.au Magazine. In the years after the magazine's launch, NewsLifeMedia — like all Australian magazine publishers — faced severe print headwinds: paid print circulation across its titles fell by double digits in the mid-2010s, and titles including Donna Hay's print edition eventually closed.

Taste.com.au Magazine's survival through that period reflected the strength of its parent brand. While standalone food magazines struggled, the taste.com.au ecosystem — website, magazine, app, cookbooks, and later the Coles partnership integrating supermarket food content — gave the title multiple revenue streams and a built-in audience. News Corp Australia's lifestyle division, under which the brand now sits, has continued to report the taste.com.au digital brand among its leading performers, with the website topping the lifestyle category in Ipsos iris rankings through 2025 and 2026.

The reverse-publishing gamble

The decision to launch a print magazine from a website ran against every trend in the industry. In 2013 Australian publishers were pouring resources into digital transformation, trying to convert print readers into online audiences; NewsLifeMedia did the opposite, betting that a digital audience could be converted into print buyers. The logic was grounded in the taste.com.au brand's unusual strength: by 2013 the site was not merely a popular food website but a daily utility for millions of Australian cooks, with a recipe database running into the tens of thousands and deep integration into the weekly shop through meal-planning tools.

The launch campaign reflected the scale of the bet. A seven-figure marketing spend, national television advertising, thousands of point-of-sale displays and front-of-store ranging at both major supermarket chains gave the debut issue a retail presence no magazine launch had enjoyed in years. The publisher's research — showing more than four in five site users would buy the magazine — suggested the audience was pre-sold; the sold-out advertising inventory and the lifted print run confirmed it.

The gamble's success influenced the industry's thinking about brand extensions. Where publishers had treated websites as marketing for magazines, Taste.com.au Magazine demonstrated that the flow could reverse — that a strong enough digital brand could anchor a print product. Few publishers replicated the feat at the same scale, but the title's early years remain the textbook example of reverse publishing in the Australian market.

Brand extensions

The magazine was never a standalone product. From the start it sat within a brand ecosystem: the taste.com.au website, the magazine, the app, cookbooks, and commercial partnerships. The Taste Planner meal-planning tool, the site's recipe database, and later the partnership with Coles integrating supermarket food content into the taste.com.au platform, all fed the same audience loop — readers discovering recipes online, buying the magazine for curated collections, and shopping the ingredients through partner retailers.

That ecosystem is what sustained the brand through the print market's decline. Even as newsstand sales across the industry fell, taste.com.au's digital audience grew to several million monthly users, topping the lifestyle category in national audience rankings. The magazine, in print and app form, became one channel among several — but the channel that carried the brand's premium, curated identity.

The magazine today

The taste.com.au Magazine app's continued updates through 2026 confirm the brand's ongoing publication in digital form, carrying the monthly magazine's recipes and features to subscribers on mobile devices. The title's journey — from website to print magazine to app — traces the arc of Australian magazine publishing over the past decade: digital audiences built first, print as a brand extension, and mobile as the enduring platform.

For the Australian food media landscape, Taste.com.au Magazine remains a landmark: proof that in the 2010s, a digital-native brand could still launch a successful print magazine, and that service journalism — useful, reliable recipes — could outsell lifestyle gloss in the toughest market Australian magazines had ever faced.