Amanda and Merrill first met in 2004 when they worked together on a New York Times cookbook. Amanda was the food editor of the newspaper’s magazine, while Merrill was a freelance food editor and writer.

It was almost a year after Food52 launched that it got its first $750,000 of external investment. As user numbers soared over the next decade, investment was easier to find. The company has now secured a total $13.3m of funding., external

Food52, which gets it name from the number of weeks in a year, gets almost three-quarters of its revenues from merchandise sales, and the remainder from advertising and other commercial tie-ups.

After selling other brands of kitchen equipment for five years, in 2018 it started to sell its own-label products.

To help design each item Food52 turned to the website’s users for inspiration, asking them what they wanted from a product. No less than 10,000 people filled out a survey about what makes a perfect wooden chopping board.

“The engagement is off the charts,” says Merrill, who is the company’s co-founder and president. “People are really passionate about this area.”

Amanda adds: “[The company] understands how to motivate and mobilise people to buy things. That’s pretty valuable to any brand.”