As the smell of sizzling bacon wafted through the air, dozens of recipe developers, food stylists and photographers trotted around, misting bottles of wine with Evian to depict the perfect drops of condensation and dusty chocolate chips over a fluffy peanut butter pie.
This is what Neil Vogel likes to think of as his “secret weapon” in the new era of artificial intelligence: a 40,000-square-foot test kitchen just outside of Birmingham, Ala.
Mr. Vogel, CEO of People Inc., one of the nation’s largest digital and print publishers and home to brands such as Food & Wine, People, Entertainment Weekly, Allrecipes and Southern Living, has already seen chatbots increase search traffic and AI-generated slop flood the Internet. And he’s betting that readers would rather make a recipe created by someone who knows how to handle a chef’s knife than one generated by a robot.
People Inc., which already creates more food-related content than anyone else, is ramping up production of social media videos out of the complex of 28 kitchens and leaning into the human element behind its recipes: Each one is developed, tested and retested by people. After all, AI famously recommended using glue on a pizza.
“What has happened in this world of artificial intelligence, especially around food, is that no one knows what is right and what is good,” said Mr. Vogel in an interview. “Everyone who cooks at this point has used an AI recipe that doesn’t work because you can’t take four recipes and synthesize them together.”
The kitchen hub was opened in 2016 by the then Time Inc. Through a series of mergers that reflected the consolidation of the magazine industry, Time Inc. eventually part of People Inc., which until 2025 was known as Dotdash Meredith.
To honor this spirit of name change, People Inc.’s parent company, IAC, announced in April that it would now be known as “People Incorporated” to reflect the focus on its publishing business. That decision was deliberate in the age of AI, said Barry Diller, the chairman of People Incorporated.
“Until we get to the final simulation, people are the only truly valid, honorable and positive action that People Inc. can take,” he said in an interview.
The Birmingham facility develops around 1,800 new recipes a year and tests a further 5,300. Downstairs is a prop storage room, bursting with a rainbow of china, glassware and tablecloths in every fabric imaginable. The facility also has a “laboratory” that has evaluated more than 3,000 products to date, mostly kitchen appliances.
For years, the hub was focused almost exclusively on creating content for the company’s print magazines. At the end of 2022, Mr. Vogel saw a need to change. He and other executives at the company had just met with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who showed them the capabilities of ChatGPT before it went public in November.
“We walked out of that room and we just looked at each other, ‘This is a new world,'” Mr. Vogel recalled.
Traffic to People Inc. sites from Google has dropped to 25 percent of visits, from 75 percent, over the past four years due to the search platform’s use of AI resumes. So the company quickly pushed to build new audiences on platforms like Instagram, Apple News and YouTube and find other ways to make money through events, sponsorships and licensing deals.
To encourage readers to keep coming back to their sites, People Inc. MyRecipes, a free product that allows them to save recipes from the publications; it now has more than three million users, Mr. Vogel said. On Tuesday, People Inc. announced that it had acquired Hot Luck, an annual food and music festival in Austin, Texas.
And the test kitchen was refocused to create more social media videos for People Inc.’s food brands. With 13 photo studios and three video studios, it now produces around 175 videos a month.
“The fundamentals of what we’ve done here haven’t changed, but the way we do it keeps changing so quickly,” said Allison Lowery, vice president of content studies.
On the day The New York Times visited the test kitchens, a recipe developer was working on a Pub Sub Dip for Southern Living — an homage to a famous sub sandwich from the Publix grocery chain that had been trending on social media. In another area, a food stylist was filmed demonstrating how to fold onigirazu, a type of sushi sandwich.
In another kitchen, some staff members tested a creamy tomato aspic, a retro, cantaloupe-colored gelatin mold studded with olives, sweating under the studio lights. It was part of a new project by Southern Living, which has been published since 1966, to test and digitize its vast archive of recipes, which includes more than 20,000 that have never been published online.
“AI can’t smell what something smells like,” said Sid Evans, editor-in-chief of Southern Living. “It can’t taste. It doesn’t understand nostalgia. And I think we’re able to communicate all that and the expertise that we have.”
Mr. Vogel is quick to acknowledge that he is not an AI denier. People Inc. has a license agreement with OpenAI and uses it both for research and to make operations more efficient by monitoring social media or pricing ingredients. AI is not used for writing, editing, visualization or other creative work at any of the brands, he said.
Not all of People Inc.’s decisions are equally people-focused. It has shed nearly 1,000 workers since 2021, mainly reductions from halving the number of magazine titles it prints to seven from 14. Mr. Vogel said in the interview that People Inc. was profitable and growing; the company has reported 10 consecutive quarters of digital revenue growth.
So far, executives at People Inc.’s food brands say they’re seeing evidence that their strategy is resonating with readers, who hold the company’s recipes and videos to a high standard.
In January, Food & Wine posted an Instagram photo of a freshly made bowl of nikujaga, a Japanese meat-and-potato stew. Several commentators quickly condemned it as the work of artificial intelligence.
It “got my hackles raised,” said Hunter Lewis, editor-in-chief of Food & Wine. He defended the post in his magazine column, listing by name the nine people who had worked to assign, develop, test, taste, style and shoot the recipe.
But he quickly realized that the commentators’ outrage was not an insult.
“It’s really encouraging to me, actually,” said Mr. Lewis. “People pay for our products because of that level of trust and that expectation of quality, and it’s not made by a machine.”
