Research / First Blog

     Hello, my name is Anthony Lowe and I am a senior at Coral Springs Charter School. When introduced to the magazine project, my mind was drawn to two topics specifically. Either a sports magazine - targeting basketball- or a cooking/food magazine. Mainly because I've drawn attraction to these two types of magazines in my life specifically. I love cooking food and find a hobby in that, but I also do love to play sports and play basketball with my friends.

    So it was a tough choice deciding which one I wanted my Cambridge grade to rely on. But after some heavy research and a lot of thinking, I came to the conclusion that I wanted my magazine to be a cook-book type of magazine specialized in helping people make meal prepping food. 

    Now for this magazine, the majority target audience would probably be people who are heavily influenced by fitness or people who care about their health and the things they eat. A marginal target audience could be people who are in the lower class financially wise but also care about their health and the things they put in their body. Some other people that our magazine would target is potentially mothers or wives who may pack food for others and not just themselves as they may use this as a guide to help them through their week to week life.

    Typically, the average cooking book magazine or food magazine consists of:

• Recipes
• Chef Profiles
• Travel & Culture foods
• Kitchen tool recommendation
• Reviews of kitchenware shown
• Nutritional facts about the foods that are presented

Some adds that we may see are:

• From big food brands (Campbell's, Kraft, etc.)
• Kitchen tools & Appliances

When wandering down the aisle at your local store, you would typically see celebrities featured on cook books or see them throughout the book. This is because as of recently, more and more of these A-list celebrities are using cookbooks to reach out to their audiences or connect to a larger market of potential fanbases. 

Usually when viewing cover imagery, we see these mouth watering attention catching types of food plastered onto the whole page. For example:

•Cooking Light Brain Foods Magazine Spring 2025 81 Mind-Boosting Recipes: Cooking Recipes: Amazon.com: Books

•The New Mexico Magazine Centennial Cookbook: A Century of Flavors [Book]

•The All-New Complete Cooking Light Cookboook: The Ultimate Guide from America's #1 Food Magazine: Editors of Cooking Light Magazine: 9780848730239: Amazon.com: Books

Magazines are designed typically to catch your eye immediately. And how they do this:

• They'll pick a "mouth watering" type of entrée on the cover. Typically very large and takes up majority of the space
• Capitalized words on the cover (attention grabbing)
• Bold letters (attention grabbing)

On the layouts of the pages, you would see;

• A large picture of the meal being cooked
• A large bold title of the name of the food
• And text of the recipe typically made in smaller paragraph or bullet point style

The photography usually consist of;

• A close up shot of the meal
• Usually stationed on a counter top or on a solid color background

• https://brandpacks.com/templates/food-cookbook-magazine-template/

Even though this is a template of a cookbook magazine, it represents how the vast majority of these magazines look like. For example we see the;

• The entrée being presented on a solid color background
• Big bold letters on the cover which are used to grab attention
• The recipe pages being depicted with a large image of the meal, and that short paragraph style to present the recipe

Food magazines are marketed in a variety of ways. We see them distributed physically most commonly in supermarkets. Whereas some other places where we could see print distribution being sold are newstands, food retail stores, subscription mail delivery. But as technology developed more and more, we saw less of newsstands and subscription mail delivery and saw more of online subscription to magazine publisher editorials because of the birth and rise of the internet. Major chains stores like Barnes & Noble are one of the most popular distributors of food magazines because of the wide variety of magazines that they have to offer in store.

One of the most known form of promotion for food magazines are social media advertisements where you'll see a creator post a meal and then promote their cookbook or food magazine towards the end of their video. With a hashtag like "#HolidayCooking" or "#RecipeOfTheWeek." This would also be the most successful as many chefs can reach completely different audiences through social media growing the genre and their personal brand.

The main demographic of people being targeted are Adults around the ages of 30s to 60s who regularly cook at home, middle class or higher income households that has expendables income that they can use on experimenting and trying new recipes. Mainly because they are the generation that still may rely on print magazine and also this would be the age group that finds a passion or "necessity" in using a food magazine to assist them in throughout their lives. 

This demographic of individuals are communicated too by using language that is more adult oriented and presents itself in advertisements that assume that the readers is knowledgeable and actually cares about cooking. Also many of the "lifestyle" themed cookbooks show that they are targeted towards the older population due to the fact that many teens or younger adults (college students) don't really care much for "lifestyle cooking."

Analysis of a Food Magazine Cover

• Very bold and large title "HEALTHY" in all caps
• food entrée as the centerpiece of cover
• solid color background so all your attention is on the food and titles
• A lot of writing
• celebrity mentioned on cover to grab the reader's curiosity
• Many subtitles to list what will be expected in the magazine
• Representation
• People involved in fitness who care for their health
• the lower/middle class who may not have the finances to make a lot of high end meals. Hence the "Budget 7 - day diet plan"

This magazine cover that I chose reinforces genre conventions that I discovered but also introduced me to some new ones that I am starting to notice. What this magazine reinforces is that the cover of food magazines are mainly used to grab your attention and get you to open it and read more, just like many other forms of media do. But what it introduces me to that I didn't notice at first was the fact that magazine covers are filled to the brim with information. As you can see, there is barely any white space at all on the cover as the whole thing is covered with either pictures or information about what's to be expected in the magazine.

https://pocketmags.com/us/good-food-home-cooking-series-magazine/healthy-winter-2023?srsltid=AfmBOooZOIAL4-XRjipey_XRIqlpXRazND4NWgnr_6ojbZrMU6KQGz4R (picture)

Analysis #2

• Half of the title is bold while the other half isn't
• Food as the main attraction of the cover
• we see the cookies very large with nothing else in the picture
• On this one we see an advertisement on the cover
• Abundance of writing on the cover
• No celebrity mentioned on cover
• Representation
• Men who are into cooking or health (top right we see "Men's Health Special")
• People who are also into heavy baking (the cover picture is cookies on a baking tray and then we also see "the best chocolate cake you will ever make" on the side.)

What we see on this magazine cover also reinforces the genre conventions that I've learned but was fairly different from the one I covered before. For this one, we see that half the title is in bold font while the other half isn't. I can infer that maybe they want your attention on the "good" part first so that then you'll read the other half. It's almost like they want to overly emphasize the "good" so that you think that you will read some recipes that are worth your time. How this challenges genre conventions that I've learned is that I didn't expect to see and advertisement on the cover. Where they say "Win a home improvement bundle worth $750 with crown, see page 24 for more details" (circle on right side). This magazine does this and promotes the brand Crown Paints on the cover which was unexpected because looking at other magazines, we do see promotions and advertisements in them on the actual pages of the magazine, but I have yet to see one with an advertisement on the cover page until this one.

https://www.amazon.com/BBC-Good-Food-Magazine/dp/B01FGEOJMY (picture)

Food Magazine Analysis

1. 

Genre Convention: A large dominant picture of the entrée that is well lit and professionally shot. This holds meaning because of the fact that the picture on the cover is the reason people read your magazine. Its what gets them hooked in and what makes them pick it up off shelves. So having a good photo like this one does just that.

2. 

Genre Convention: This magazine cover mentions a celebrity on the cover (Gail Simmons) to help draw in viewers to read further. And this does that, many viewers who are actually into cooking would love to read further based on the fact that they see this celebrity chef mentioned on the cover.

 

3. 

Genre Convention: The font color for the text differentiate a lot from the actual picture. It's like the authors did this purposefully so that you would be drawn to read the words that they have written.

4.

Genre Convention: What I noticed for this was that unlike all the other covers, this one takes a very minimalist approach and doesn't have as much texts on the cover as the others do.

5.

Genre Convention: This one is very feminine like and would appear more to the female audience. And yes this genre convention successfully does this because of the fact that the cover is pink, the font is pink and purple, and it's mainly about baking (All feminine things).

Representation

• Males and females, but mainly females due to the fact that in majority households, we see the female doing the cooking. So many magazines will cater more to that audience rather than the male audience
• These magazines usually represent people of older age. Around there mid 30s to upper 60s. Mainly due to the fact they expect their average reader to be around that age. In my magazine above, they use a celebrity named Gail Simmons to help grab the attention of the reader. But to me, and probably majority of the teen and younger population, I had no clue who Gail Simmons was. Come to find out, she was a top chef on a british T.V show in the early 2000s. So this shows that like, even the celebrities that they use to market their products, are of the older generations to appeal to that older audience.
• All social classes are really represented throughout food magazines. Like how I showed before, they cater to all classes like how some have "budget friendly meals."

My Research

Search Terms That I Used

• "Food Magazine"
• "Gail Simmons"
• "Food Magazine Cover"

Sources That I Rejected

Questions That I Still Have

Why do magazines plant so much information on the cover? I plan to research this by finding out more reasons on why they plaster so much information on the front of the magazine.