Other attributes
Fexy Media is a digital food platform connecting millions of home cooks to grocers, brands, and recipe publishers. The company's three main offerings include Relish, Fexy Studios, and Roadfood.
Fexy is headquartered in Mercer Island, Washington, with additional locations in Orlando, Florida, and Nashville, Tennessee. The company was founded in Seattle, Washington, in 2014 by tech veterans Lisa and Cliff Sharples and investment professional Ben Sternberg with private equity backing by Tritium Partners. Fexy Media has been awarded nine James Beard Awards and three Telly Awards. The company also has numerous New York Times Best Sellers and IACP Cookbook of the Year awards.
Relish is a shoppable recipe platform developed by Fexy Media. The site has an audience of over 100 million unique visitors per month who use it to discover recipes, plan meals, and purchase groceries for same-day delivery or in-store pickup.
Relish partners with top food bloggers to select best-in-class recipes, currently at over 50,000. Users can save favorite recipes in one place on Relish from over twenty-five different online recipe sites. Users can then modify serving sizes, and create shopping lists to print or send directly to Instacart, Amazon Fresh, and Walmart for same-day Grocery delivery.
The consumer package goods industry and various food brands also use Relish’s digital shopper marketing programs to drive purchases.
Fexy Studios is a turnkey digital video and content production studio focused on the creation and distribution of food, travel, and multi-language content across mass distribution channels, Fexy sites, Connected TV, and customer channels.
Roadfood highlights casual and affordable eateries along highways, small towns, and big cities. These eateries are diners, small-town cafes, seaside shacks, drive-ins, barbecues, and bake shops that are often colorful places enjoyed by locals and savvy travelers. Roadfood was first published as a guidebook in 1977 by Jane and Michael Stern and grew into an online food media site.
Fexy Media acquired Roadfood in June 2015 for an undisclosed amount. As part of the deal, the founders of Roadfood stayed on and continued the site with the support of Fexy, which intended to refocus the site to attract a younger generation.
In September 2020, Fexy Media sold Serious Eats and Simply Recipes to Dotdash, now Dotdash Meredith, in an all-cash deal. At the time of the deal, the two websites reached a combined 16 million people per month. The deal was expected to allow Fexy to move out of an ad-supported digital media model and focus on Relish, its other recipe website.
As part of the deal, Fexy and Dotdash agreed to partner to help grow Relish and deploy it across The Spruce Eats, and Simply Recipes and Serious Eats would continue to use Fexy's Relish technology, enabling consumers to save and shop recipes.
Fexy Media has acquired several companies since its inception in 2014. The acquisitions include PGOA Media, Simply Recipes, Serious Eats, and Roadfood. The company's first acquisition was PGOA Media in December 2014. In June 2015, Fexy Media bought both Serious Eats and Roadfood. Specific details on these two acquisitions were not disclosed, but the money for the purchases came from a $40 million fund that Fexy had previously raised with Tritium Partners in Austin, Texas. Fexy Media acquired Simply Recipes in April 2016.
Fexy Media was originally founded as Teneology in 2013 by Cliff Sharples, with the goal of acquiring promising digital media businesses. Tenelology planned to look for deals in the range of $100,000 to $20 million, using cash from investment partner Tritium Partners of Austin, Texas.
In 2014, Teneology evolved into Fexy Media, a venture founded by Lisa and Cliff Sharples and Ben Sternberg with continued private equity backing by Tritium Partners. Fexy's strategy was to assemble a team of tastemakers and food experts that drove personal connections for the brands they were building and drove a primarily millennial audience to the personalities, digital properties, and content Fexy was developing.
Before starting Fexy Media, Cliff Sharples served in executive roles at Austin vacation rental network HomeAway and Seattle comedy site Cheezburger, and Lisa Sharples spent six years running Allrecipes, another Seattle-based food site catering to millennials. During her tenure, she helped Allrecipes develop a large audience and secure a $175 million acquisition. The Sharples also founded Garden.com in 1995, taking the company public in 1999 right before the dot-com bust. Ben Sternberg was an M&A advisor and investment professional with Raine.
