Kalle Bergman has been passionate about food for as long as he can remember. Born and raised in Stockholm but now a New York resident, Bergman struggles to pick his three favorite restaurants in the city.
He almost refuses to state his picks, citing the impossible challenge of the ever-changing nature of the restaurant industry. After naming Acme, Turntable, and Atera for various, tasty reasons, he says, “Ask me again tomorrow, and most likely the list will be different.”
As the founder and Editor in Chief of Honest Cooking, Bergman admits his entrepreneurial journey, which began in 2001, hasn’t been the smoothest, but he wouldn’t change a thing about it. In 2011, Bergman launched the online culinary magazine that provides an international audience with food-related news, recipes, and travel stories. His mission is to revolutionize online food media.
For this edition of Member Spotlight, a series where we showcase the entrepreneurs of emerging companies, we chatted with Bergman to learn about the way he’s changing food media.
My life as an entrepreneur has been a very bumpy road, but I’ve never regretted going down it. There are few things as rewarding as taking an idea and trying to bring it to life. I wanted to create a digital magazine that had the look and feel of a publication that’s been around forever. I wanted to also infuse the personality and passion I found in the food-blogging world. I believe that if you start cooking, you start talking about food, and if you start talking about food, you start caring about it. Once you care, there really is no way back to not caring.
We don’t have one specific editorial voice. Rather, we have 600 different and very personal voices through our contributors. That hopefully makes us more inspiring, more unexpected, and more delicious. Our network of contributors is also a network of independent publishers, and we work with advertisers to create uniquely branded content that is published throughout our network, not just on Honest Cooking. We are essentially a native advertising network with our own anchor property.
Media is not dying — it’s thriving! I believe that power is already shifting from the large publishing houses to independent publications that are driven by true passion and new ideas. We, and other independent publishers, create reader and advertiser value at a fraction of the cost without diminishing the quality of content.
Don’t panic. All the stuff you read about 21-year-old, first-time entrepreneurs who made a billion dollars on their new app can stress out anyone. I meet people who give up after their first try at entrepreneurship or feel like failures just because their startup hasn’t been featured on TechCrunch after two months.
Being an entrepreneur is a long-term engagement. You will have more failures than successes — I sure have, and none of your successes will come for free. Be in it for the right reasons and not just to make a billion bucks, because most likely, you won’t. So, make sure you do what you love, because even if you do fail, at least you will have fun in the process.
Photographs by Lauren Kallen