Gooseberry Patch

Gooseberry Patch was founded in 1984 by Vickie Hutchins and Jo Ann Martin, who were neighbors. Before starting their catalog business Martin was a first-grade teacher, and Hutchins was a flight attendant.

Gooseberry Patch encourages customers to submit recipes, some of which are selected for inclusion in Gooseberry Patch recipe books. Since 1992, over 200 cookbooks have been published with nearly 9.0 million sold. Crowd sourcing or peer production, both relatively new terms, have been an integral part of the cookbook production since 1992.

January 1, 2010 new financial partners, who are committed to the brand's growth, joined with the existing creative team. As a first step in this new growth strategy, Gooseberry Patch aggressively engaged in social media during late 2009. Not surprisingly, the loyal Gooseberry Patch fans responded enthusiastically. Consider the following milestones achieved:

Nearly 270,000 actively engaged Facebook fans - ranking in the top 4% of corporate Facebook pages; 1.1M views of their YouTube channel [10] - featuring book trailers, In the Kitchen with Vickie & JoAnn recipe how-to's & behind-the-scenes videos; over 11,500 followers on Twitter - engaging in lively interaction daily; averaging over 9,000 daily page views on their blog - publishing new stories 5 to 7 times weekly; 134,000 followers on Pinterest with pins repined over 5,000 times per month [11]; nearly 1.3M reads on their Scribd page [12], and nearly 350,000 current email subscribers - communicating weekly. Their first Apple App was made available in early 2011 to allow users to stay connected.

To satisfy the growing customer demand, Gooseberry Patch is expanding the availability of their cookbooks through multiple channel partners. A few of these partners include National Book Network, Notions Marketing Corporation and Send The Light Distribution. In order to focus on cookbook publishing and reduce any potential channel conflict with retail partners, the Gooseberry Patch mail-order catalog was discontinued as of the end of 2009.

Gooseberry Patch has been recognized as a national best-selling publisher by Nielsen BookScan, who compiles their list based on raw numbers of books sold nationally. Of the over 240 titles in this series, several have been ranked as National Bestselling Titles by Nielsen BookScan: Super-Fast Slow Cooking (ISBN 978-1-933494-55-5), Summer in the Country (ISBN 978-1-933494-68-5), Farmhouse Kitchen (ISBN 978-1-933494-82-1), Rush-Hour Recipes (ISBN 978-1-612810-30-0), Simple Shortcut Recipes (ISBN 978-1-612810-49-2) and Garfield...Recipes with Cattitude![eBook] (ISBN 978-1-62093-097-7).

Gooseberry Patch launched their first eBook titles in the Fall of 2010 now having over 140 titles on Amazon.com, B&N.com, Sony's Reader Store, Apple iBookstore, Kobo.com and Google Books. There have been approximately 4 million eBook downloads.

Knack3 has launched the Gooseberry Patch-branded line of collectible and functional home products. The products coordinate across a series of items including dinnerware, drinkware, kitchen textiles, table linens and more. There are five themed collections including Farmers' Market, Sunflowers, Harvest, Halloween and Holiday. Products will be shipping in April 2013.

Following the changes to the business, 9 full-time, and 2 part-time, people are employed in the areas of Wholesale Sales, Creative, Information Technology and Administration. Offices are located in Columbus, Ohio.

Gooseberry Patch was acquired by Rowman & Littlefield in 2015; it will operate as an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.