BOSTON – After 20 years, America’s Test Kitchen is leaving Brookline, Massachusetts, for Boston.
ATK announced plans to move its headquarters to Boston’s Innovation and Design Building (IDB), an eight-story property that anchors the eastern portion of the city’s Seaport District. The IDB is home to a wide range of businesses, including the Boston Design Center, The Boston Beer Company and Maker’s Guild among others. Restaurants and event spaces round out the facility, which was envisioned as a meeting place for entrepreneurship and artistic innovation.
The new headquarters will cover 55,000 sq. ft. — nearly double the size of the current ATK headquarters. The new ATK space will house multiple state-of-the-art kitchens, including special kitchens for the company’s two television shows, “America’s Test Kitchen” and “Cook’s Country,” and for the company’s newest media initiative, “Cook’s Science.” The current test kitchen is a 2,500-sq.-ft. space in a house in Brookline.
The new space also will have three dedicated television and video studios, multiple photo and edit studios and a kitchen dedicated to product testing, all within 17,500 sq. ft. of operational space, the company said. More than 200 employees will move to the IDB by the summer of 2017. “America’s Test Kitchen” and “Cook’s Country,” will film in the new space. Viewers will see the new studio kitchens in episodes of “Cook’s Country” which will air in the fall of 2018.
“The demand for a much larger headquarters demonstrates our continued success and leadership in culinary publishing and media,” David Nussbaum, CEO of America’s Test Kitchen, said in a statement. “We are thrilled to find a new home in the Innovation and Design building to accommodate our growing operational needs.
“As one of the most cutting-edge office spaces in Boston, the Innovation and Design Building matches our ambition to be the most state-of-the-art culinary media company in the US.”
This is the latest in a series of big announcements from ATK, which produces its syndicated cooking shows for PBS. In November 2015, the company announced the departure of Christopher Kimball, co-founder of ATK and host of the company’s television programs. That same month, the company announced the addition of three new executives and a series of promotions.
Then, in February Molly Birnbaum, executive editor of Cook’s Science magazine, was named a monthly contributor to The Splendid Table, a nationally syndicated public radio program dedicated to the topic of food science.
