This week, Rea announced a partnership with meal-kit service CookUnity to sell a line of Babish-branded pre-made dishes. The first four launch in the New York tri-state area, with Chicago and Los Angeles coming next. The eventual goal is a rotating menu of 10 core dishes plus five seasonal items. Rea developed each recipe himself and worked with CookUnity’s test kitchens to make them work at scale.

Making the Food Actually Accessible

The timing makes a lot of sense. A big part of the Babish audience watches him cook dishes they have no realistic shot of pulling off at home. His pot roast and fried chicken are fan favorites, but they take serious time and technique. Now those same fans can just order them delivered. CookUnity had already been an advertising partner of the channel, so this deal grew naturally out of an existing relationship. Rea gets paid per meal sold.

A Podcast, a Rental, and More

The CookUnity partnership is just one piece of a busy stretch for the Binging with Babish brand. Back in May, Rea launched a podcast through Vox Media called In the Booth with Babish. It runs every two weeks and features long-form conversations about food with guests like William H. Macy and Alton Brown. Vox handles the production backend while Rea keeps creative control. The first season runs 26 episodes.

Earlier this spring he also opened Bed n Babish, a short-term rental compound along the Delaware River designed for food-focused travelers. It rounds out an already solid portfolio that includes several cookbooks, a cookware line sold through Walmart and Amazon, and Baked with Babish, a THC-infused sugar product that is getting a wider rollout this fall.

Building a Business Without the Martha Stewart Gene

Rea hit 4 million YouTube subscribers earlier this year. He quit his day job in post-production just six months after starting the channel in 2016, which says a lot about how quickly the audience responded. The business today runs lean: his longtime friend Sawyer Jacobs serves as CEO, and there are four full-time staffers including two editors. Made In, the cookware brand, invested $3 million in the operation in exchange for native sponsored content on the channel.

Despite all of it, Rea is pretty clear that the business side is not what drives him. He is a film school graduate who spent seven years in post-production before YouTube, and that creative background is still very much the engine. He is going into production this summer on a thriller he has been writing for about a decade, a story about a person who wakes up in a different body each day. He pointed to Kane Parsons, the Backrooms filmmaker now developing a project with A24, as the kind of trajectory the creator path can actually open up.

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

Andrew Rea, Binging with Babish

That quote sums up where the creator economy sits right now. The most durable creator brands are not just banking ad revenue anymore. They are building product lines, media partnerships, and experiences that can hold an audience well beyond a single platform. Binging with Babish is a pretty good example of what that looks like when it actually works.

The post How Binging with Babish Turned 10 Years of YouTube Into a Full Business appeared first on Marketeller.

What Into the Blue Actually Means

The program is the next logical step in Lowe’s creator strategy. When Lowe’s launched its first-party Creator Network in June 2025, it became the first home improvement retailer to build something like this. At its one-year milestone, the network has grown to about 28,000 creators with a goal of hitting 30,000 by the end of the year. The Into the Blue component merges that network with a separate entrepreneurship program Lowe’s launched back in 2022 for suppliers and small business pitches.

Jen Wilson, Lowe’s SVP and Chief Marketing Officer, described the thinking behind it: “We’ve been thinking about this evolution of our creator network as taking it from content to curation to creation. We’ve helped other small businesses manufacture and distribute products, so we know how to do this, without sitting on too much inventory, or without breaking the system. We have the blueprint.”

How MrBeast Proved the Model

The MrBeast partnership is the clearest example of what this can look like when it works. MrBeast was the first major creator to join the Lowe’s Creator Network at launch, and the collaboration grew from content into a full physical product line called MrBeast Lab Swarms. These are collectible build kits sold exclusively through Lowe’s Kids Club workshops, priced at $14.98 per month and featuring toys like the Swarm Launcher, Swarm Spinner, and Swarm Jet. The program did well enough that Lowe’s is now using it as the blueprint for opening product creation up to the broader creator network.

Wilson put it plainly: “We were really inspired by that process, and feel like the natural progression is to open that up to other creators who might have their own ideas. That might be our product design team partnering with one of our creators who has a vision for a patio set, it might be somebody who has a vision for a new tool belt or even a new tool, function or a product that we’ve not seen before.”

What This Signals for Brands in the Creator Economy

The three application tracks tell you a lot about how Lowe’s is thinking about this. Creators can submit existing products that just need distribution and retail scale, brand new ideas that need development and sourcing support, or collaborations that connect to something already in the Lowe’s product line. Applications are open through September 1, 2026 at Lowes.com/CreateWithLowes.

This is worth watching even if you are not in the home improvement space. Lowe’s creator strategy has expanded in a lot of directions over the past year: World Cup activations, the A’ja Wilson and Jalen Brunson partnership, and a Live Nation deal that gives loyalty members exclusive concert perks. The through line is CMO Jen Wilson’s stated goal of shifting Lowe’s identity from a home improvement store to something closer to a lifestyle brand.

The creator economy has produced a lot of partnerships that end up looking more like ads than actual collaboration. What Lowe’s is building here is different: a program with real infrastructure, a working proof of concept in MrBeast Lab Swarms, and a clear pipeline from creator pitch to retail shelf. That is what separates this from a press release. Retail Dive has the full Q&A with Jen Wilson if you want to go deeper.

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