Eating Well Magazine’s New Lease on Life

But as in any new relationship, especially when it involves partners who have been burned, Eating Well’s 40 employees are wary. Hachette bought Eating Well in the late 1990s and abruptly shut it down. It took a decade for the magazine’s small but loyal staff to build it up again and place its trust in a new corporate owner.

“Everyone was a little nervous at first we would get sucked up by this big company,” said Stacy Fraser, the test kitchen manager who worked at the magazine under both owners and on a recent afternoon worked around stacks of freshly picked apples and gourds lining the test kitchen counter. “People are feeling more secure that Meredith is in for the long run.”

But Eating Well is still trying to forge its own path in a world without Gourmet, the long-running magazine that published its last issue in November 2009. It didn’t follow the approach many food magazines took through the recession and celebrate high-calorie foods, like rich pasta dishes or ribs, aiming to take the edge off readers’ job losses and dwindling retirement accounts. The magazine isn’t coveted by foodies as is Lucky Peach, from McSweeney’s and the chef David Chang, and isn’t afraid to offer the kind of tips that some might scorn, like using store-bought pizza dough or making Jell-O desserts.

“We’re not going to outdo Gourmet,” said Lisa Gosselin, the editorial director. She played down her own cooking talents as she presided over a flavorful lunch of oven-baked fried chicken, a crunchy and flavorful massaged kale salad, fresh bean and tomato salad with honey vinaigrette and Cheddar cornmeal biscuits with chives.

Readers don’t seem to want Eating Well to veer from its format of recipes and articles about flavorful healthy meals for readers with limited time and tight budgets. Ms. Gosselin said readers sent angry letters when the magazine profiled the healthy eating habits of celebrities like the model and designer Lauren Bush and Elisabeth Hasselbeck of “The View.” It welcomes celebrity chefs when they talk about food.

“The difference between us and the Food Network is we’re more about food and less about entertainment,” she said.

As advertising has dwindled in the past year at many food magazines, Eating Well’s advertising pages declined by 7.4 percent in the past year, in line with many other food magazines, but it has gained circulation under Meredith, jumping to 549,300 from 369,231 in the last year.

Meredith executives credit the growth to their ability to market the magazine to 100 million subscribers to their magazines, books and other products. Newsstand sales, helped by the company’s previous relationships with sellers, jumped 46 percent in the past year to 73,311, from 49,909.

(Meredith also doesn’t appear to be giving away the magazine to raise circulation. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the average subscription price per copy in 2011 declined to $2.01 from $2.14 the year before.)

By comparison, Cooking Light, which is owned by Time Inc., had a decline in advertising pages of 17 percent, and its circulation modestly rose to 1.814 million, from 1.783 million. Food Network, the blockbuster magazine owned by Hearst, had an ad page increase of 14.8 percent and a small circulation bump, as well.

Tom Harty, president of Meredith’s National Media Group, said the company wanted Eating Well to thrive, and he pointed to its new offices here in Shelburne as proof of its commitment. “We are extremely pleased with its growth and performance over the past year,” Mr. Harty said.

Eating Well also makes money by repackaging its healthy recipes and nutritional content to outside organizations. It supplies recipes to Food Network’s Web site, repackages some of its content into newsletters for health care companies and publishes a free magazine called Eat Healthy Your Way to be placed in checkout lines at commissaries on military bases around the world.

The licensing and custom publishing business now make up about one-quarter of Eating Well’s total revenue, and that part of the business, according to the company, is growing more than 30 percent a year.