Andrew Rea, the YouTube cooking creator behind “Binging with Babish,” is rolling out a cluster of new ventures marking his most ambitious push yet to extend the channel into a broader media and consumer business, according to ADWEEK.

On July 1, Rea announced a partnership with prepared-meal service CookUnity to sell a line of Babish-branded pre-made dishes. CookUnity, a longtime advertising partner of the channel, will begin selling four Babish-designed dishes in the New York tri-state area, with expansion to Chicago and Los Angeles planned in the coming months. Rea developed each recipe himself and worked with the company’s test kitchens to make them scalable, with an eventual lineup rotating between 10 mainstays and five seasonal items.

The meal delivery service launch follows two others. In May, Babish debuted a podcast in partnership with Vox Media called “In the Booth with Babish,” a long-form interview show featuring guests including William H. Macy and Alton Brown discussing their relationships with food. The first season runs 26 episodes every other week. Vox provides back-end support while Rea retains creative control. He said the recent break-up of Vox Media, which was sold in two tranches to Lupa Systems and Penske Media Company, did not affect his decision to partner with the company.

Earlier this spring, Rea opened Bed n Babish, a short-term rental compound along the Delaware River designed for traveling foodies. The new ventures join an existing portfolio that includes several cookbooks, a cookware line carried in Walmart and Amazon, and Baked with Babish, a THC-infused sugar brand expanding its product line this fall.

“Every YouTuber is a small business,” Rea said. “You are an LLC generating revenue and changing your business model depending on what’s trending.”

The expansion reflects a broader pattern among top creators of converting platform-built audiences into diversified, owned businesses rather than relying on a single revenue stream tied to brand deals or ad revenue. Rea pointed to creators including MrBeast and Jesser as part of the same shift, and cited Kane Parsons, the “Backrooms” filmmaker now developing a project with A24, as a model for the kind of creative ambition he is pursuing next: a short film he has been writing for a decade goes into production this summer.

Rea, who hit 4 million YouTube subscribers earlier this year, quit his job in post-production within six months of starting the channel in 2016. His longtime friend Sawyer Jacobs now runs the company as CEO, overseeing four full-time staff, including two editors. The cookware brand Made In invested $3 million in the business to fund native content for the channel, Rea said.

“I’ve divorced myself from the business side of things so I could focus on the creative,” Rea said. “I don’t have that Martha Stewart gene in me.”

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