How do magazine brands maintain a dedicated and loyal audience in the modern age of social media? We ask Jessica Gunn, editor of Waitrose Food – a magazine that celebrated twenty five years in print in 2024, and continues to be one of the most-read food publications in the UK.

Read on for the secrets of Waitrose Food’s success, how the food and drink industry has evolved, and the importance of standing out from your competitors.

Waitrose Food magazine celebrated its 25th anniversary last year, what do you think are the reasons behind its enduring success?

Fundamentally, it comes down to keeping your audience at the heart of everything you do. It’s about knowing who your audience are and what interests them. Predicting what they want to know about before they do is also key. Print isn’t about search, it’s about serving up what people want before they know they want it. 

Food is also something that impacts everybody. It’s a unique opportunity to talk across cultures, across society and all kinds of social borders in a way that almost nothing else can. It’s always relevant; a never-ending wealth of incredible stories and tangibly useful ideas. Plus, it can bring people together around the community of food. I think as long as you can keep hold of that, you should be able to talk to your readers in a way that is interesting and relevant.

You have been editor for the last six years – what have been some of your favourite moments during that time?

The first year of being editor was absolutely awesome. I guess I hadn’t really had many aspirations to be an editor in all honesty. The job came up quite suddenly and I had to make a decision about whether I wanted to go for it or not. I decided I would, and I think that first year was just really incredible – to really hold the reins of the magazine and lead the team and be able to make changes that I wanted to make. It was really exciting.

What challenges have you faced during that time and how have you overcome them/resolved them?

A very significant challenge was coming back from maternity leave after COVID. It’s always difficult coming back into the workplace after you’ve had a baby. You’ve been off for a year, your confidence is low and you’re tired. You have to kind of feel your way in and figure out what is different, because it’s not necessarily obvious.

Returning from maternity leave when everyone had been working at home for a year, and had worked through this incredible trauma was extra hard. I didn’t go back into the office and see everyone, and I wasn’t able to have those conversations and reconnect. I had to just go into a room in the house and talk to people on a screen. Everyone had been through this horrific, super challenging ordeal, which I couldn’t share with them because I hadn’t been there with them. Trying to figure out what was going on, how broken everyone was from the process, and try to come back into a leadership role was very hard.

How do you make sure Waitrose Food stands out from its competitors?

We’re in a fortunate position that Waitrose as a brand has always been really forward thinking. When it launched Waitrose Weekend in 2010, it was quite a bold move, and something that the other supermarkets weren’t doing. With the magazine, it bought Food Illustrated, which then became Waitrose Food Illustrated and via various iterations, is now Waitrose Food. Most recently, Waitrose launched the now extraordinarily popular podcast called Dish.

As a brand, Waitrose really believes in the power of effective storytelling and content. This allows us to invest the time, energy and the attention to detail that any good magazine requires. Everything from the beginning to the end is thought through very carefully. I’ve got an incredible team who are all very committed to making the best magazine possible by being creative and being original. I think that’s the foundation of any success story.

Are the editorial team currently using AI at all to help with the editorial process/are there any plans to?

There are various ways AI is used by the team but it’s limited at this point. We are not using AI to write words. I think we’re still trying to figure out how to use it to best serve the mag and the client. 

AI is not something at this point that can replace authenticity or human creativity. Waitrose is a brand that prides itself on honesty and integrity, and we see ourselves as holders of those values as well. For instance, with any food photograph, we have food stylists and prop stylists to make the food look good – nicer than you’re probably going to make it look at home without those pro skills! But we’re not doing anything fake; everything is real and it’s all cooked then and there so we know that real people can achieve the same thing. 

After nearly 25 years in the industry yourself, what changes have you noticed within food & drink journalism?

There’s obviously been a massive shrinkage of the magazine market as so much has moved online, as well as the birth of social media; those are pretty sizeable developments. We used to talk about words and pictures in quite simple terms, and now its content, because content needs to respond to the different mediums out there. That just didn’t really exist when I started working. Access to information is obviously completely different now too. Plus, there is disinformation and plagiarism to deal with.

Social media has democratised access to food storytelling. I think food and drink is one of, if not the biggest thing that people post about on social media. That has been part of the massive shift in advertising because print media used to be the only option. This has also obviously had massive ramifications. 

Plus I think COVID has also had a dramatic impact on the restaurant, bar, hospitality and travel industries in so many ways. That was such a huge hit for them that I think they interact with the media in a much more cautious way now.