New Zealand’s Dish magazine launches into Australian supermarkets
If magazines are a declining medium, nobody told Sarah Tuck. As CEO and editor of Dish — a bi-monthly New Zealand print magazine that’s been at the forefront of seasonal recipes and food tips for the past 21 years — she is overseeing an aggressive expansion into the Australian market that goes against the prevailing wisdom that print is fading.
From this month, Dish will be available across Australia, with distribution through Coles, Woolworths, and Ritchie’s IGA stores. At first, Tuck and her team will ship 6000 copies to supermarkets, with a further 1000 earmarked for subscribers, but she expects these numbers to quickly grow as the magazine finds an audience.
It’s a big play, and one that somewhat landed in her lap. As Tuck explains to Mumbrella, the opportunity to distribute into Australian supermarkets came as a result of Delicious magazine being discontinued as a monthly print edition in June, instead being folded into the Stellar lift-out in News Corp’s Sunday newspapers.
“When I heard that Delicious were going into newspapers and pulling out of the market, I got in touch with our distributor at [publisher] SCG Media in New Zealand, and asked if there were any opportunities. And they just came straight back and said that they’d presented it and that it was a possibility to pick up those stores.”
The magazine itself is glossy yet practical. It offers aspirational dishes with affordable, available ingredients, and packs around 70 recipes into each issue.
Dish is coming to Australia.
Dish has previously been available in Australia in a limited fashion, directly through mail-order subscriptions, or as a rare import in scattered newsagencies. Dish’s own research shows this current Aussie audience is made up of 20% New Zealand ex-pats – but mostly consists of food lovers who’ve stumbled across a copy in Australia and quickly latched on.
“We’ve always had our eye on Australia,” Tuck says. “We know that our Australian audience is really passionate about the magazine, so we know that it resonates.
“We just haven’t had a chance to get as many eyeballs on it as we would like.”
In a nod to its expanded distribution, the new issue of Dish features an extract from an Australian cookbook using native Australian ingredients, a quick Q&A with the Masterchef judges, and a feature on Australian shiraz – but Tuck and her team won’t be pandering too heavily to its new audience.
“We’d like to have the opportunity to up our Australian content a little bit, but we don’t want to do it ‘just because’, you know what I mean? Because the recipes stand on their own two feet in both countries.
“But,” she concedes, “if there’s extra content that we think is particularly suitable to the Australian audience, we’d definitely pop some things in.”
Content to lure the Aussie readers
Tuck hopes the magazine will eventually be printed and distributed from Australia in order to keep the freight costs down.
“In New Zealand, we have an exceptional sell-through rate. So we sell through here 80 to 90%. And in Australia, the average kind of sell-through rate for most magazines is about 45%. We know that we’ve got the formula right in terms of the offering – we just need to make sure that we sell through at retail in Australia the same way we do here.”
She’s hands-on with the magazine, and cooks a number of the recipes in each issue, for quality assurance. In fact, as she speaks to Mumbrella, she is also prepping ingredients for an appearance on breakfast TV, where she will promote the latest issue. This is part of the magazine’s growth plan, and one that’s worked well in her homeland.
Tuck has become a familiar face on New Zealand TV, popping up on TVNZ every few months to promote the latest issue, which she’s been doing for the past six-and-a-half years. She appeared on Seven’s Sunrise last week.
Sarah Tuck
“I suppose I’m a good, reliable talent for breakfast TV, and I really enjoy sharing our recipes with people,” she says. “I think that’s a really good way for us to get the word out there.”
In the spirit of eliciting a thirty-second TV-friendly grab, Mumbrella asks Tuck for the Dish elevator pitch.
“It’s unlike anything that’s currently available on the Australian market, in that we make sure that the magazine has maintained its really glossy, high-quality presentation,” she says.
“It’s kind of like a coffee table magazine, but that you can use every day. We have up to 70 recipes in an issue. A lot of Australian titles, over time, have diluted their recipe content and done more travel and more restaurant reviews and that kind of extra content. But we really focus on the recipes. We survey our readers twice a year, and we know that what they want more than anything is better recipes.
“So, our challenge is always to make things that are seasonal, affordable, that the ingredients can be found at the local supermarket, so they’re not specialist ingredients. But the recipes that we create are slightly elevated. They’re the kind of things that you can just as happily serve to friends coming for dinner as you could make for your family.
“The biggest problem that we’ve had so far is not having the visibility at retail. So we hope that, you know, once people hear about it, if they don’t see it automatically, that they’ll ask for it – or at least look for it.”
The latest issue
Ultimately, Tuck hopes Australians who find the idea of the magazine appealing will pick up an issue and “see for themselves”.
“If they buy it once, and never buy it again, at least they’ll know the vibe and the essence of the magazine,” she says.
“We’re a really tight, committed team, we’re all super focused, and we don’t have lots of different contributors. We keep our team really lean in terms of keeping our costs under control, and we really concentrate on making a great product, rather than wasting costs in any other way.”
In New Zealand, an active online community that gathers on a Facebook page and shares photos of successful recipes they’ve made, as well as collectors who trade back issues in a bid to get a full set of Dish magazines.
There are also Dish-related clubs around New Zealand, Tuck says, with names like The Dish Divas and The Dish Dollies, who get together each time an issue comes out to make the recipes. It’s a fandom she hopes translates over the Tasman.
“There’s something slightly undefinable about the magazine in terms of the community that it’s created,” she says.
“It’s something quite special.”
Got a tip?
Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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