Whole Foods Market is wading into the publishing business and expanding its food-lifestyle empire to include a new digital monthly magazine called Dark Rye.
According to the website, Dark Rye is “an online magazine from Whole Foods Market [that] brings together pioneers of unconventional ideas to explore the edges of the creative life. It’s leisure storytelling steeped in a vision of a sustainable, decadent, and curious life.” It will include stories about art, health, food, and sustainable living.
Creators designed the layout to resemble popular fashion and music blogs–including hand-drawn illustrations, exotic typography, and new-journalism-style narrative–in what that the company hopes is a departure from the standard grocery-magazine blueprint. And while many business publications use this medium for further advertising and promotional revenue, any endorsement from Whole Foods Market is notably stripped from the pages of Dark Rye, an interesting twist in this market.
The online magazine primarily leads with photography and video profiles of people and “creators.” “It was important that the stories had an attainable participative entity, almost like, ‘Hey, I can do this, too,’” said Jacob Ellenberg, video content program lead for the company. “We want to create something where people feel like they are immediately immersed in another world.”
The first official issue of the magazine won’t be published until June or July of this summer, but here’s a teaser of what’s to come:
