When Krista Faist looks back on her path into publishing, she laughs at the twist of fate that brought her home to Toronto to launch a premium print magazine in an era that was supposed to be everything but. “As soon as I started I realized, this is what I am meant to do,” she said. “I am meant to lead something like this rather than go work for somebody else.” A decade on, her flagship titles Foodism and Escapism have carved out influential positions in the city’s food and travel culture, pairing a high-touch quarterly print product with a responsive digital and social engine that brands want to be part of.
Faist trained as a journalist at Ryerson, now Toronto Metropolitan University, then took detours through marketing and public relations before a leap of faith to the United Kingdom. There, she joined an independent publisher and helped concept and launch consumer titles focused on food, drink, and travel. “We developed Foodism and Escapism around 2014,” she recalled. After four years, she saw a gap in Toronto for premium free media with hand-to-hand distribution and ad funding. Over a pub handshake, she received the blessing to bring the brand to Canada in 2015, adding her own spin and operating independently. The bet has outlasted the industry’s most tumultuous decade.
The inheritance from London was a mindset. The Canadian market, Faist learned quickly, behaves differently from the UK and the United States in how budgets flow. “In Canada we tend to not get our own individual budgets, we tend to have to share with the US,” she said. “So they are smaller, less about population, more about the fact that we have such a beast underneath us that we are usually getting the leftovers of the budget.” Her answer has been to double down on Toronto’s value for advertisers that need precise reach.
The focus on hyperlocal shows up in everything from editorial to sales packaging. Alcohol and consumer packaged goods remain core revenue drivers, and Ontario’s listings, price promotions, and retail rules make the province a natural centre of gravity. “In Ontario we are able to work with brands when they get new LCBO listings and LTOs. That is so specific to Ontario that we get those dollars, versus a national play.” Expansion to other Canadian markets, or across the border, remains a question of opportunity and math. “I would love to expand to the States,” she said. “I would want to know we are going somewhere where the gap is there. You have fabulous food publications down there. I am not about to go in and be another one.”
How the business actually works
Faist has worn every hat. She wrote, edited, sold, and balanced the books in the early years. The only part that felt unfamiliar was sales, until she found language that fit. “As soon as I figured out that it is just marketing partnerships, but asking for money instead, I was like, I have got this,” she said. The commercial engine is built around integrated programs that stitch together print, digital, social, and real-world activations.
Advertorial remains a familiar term, though Faist prefers to describe what brands truly buy. “They are paying for control,” she said. “In editorial, you give my team one hundred percent free rein. In advertorial, you get control from start to finish to a degree. The best clients give us creative freedom to make it look, feel, and sound like us, and those are the best campaigns we do.” The result, she added, should feel seamless to the reader. “We get feedback like, I went through the magazine and I really did not feel like I was being pushed a ton of product.”
Print as the flagship, digital as the accelerator
If there is a surprise in 2025, it is how resilient print has been for Faist’s model. Foodism is approaching its 48th issue and never missed a print cycle, even in April 2020. “We stayed in print,” she said. The magazine is the flagship, a tangible object that asks readers to slow down. Yet digital was intentional from day one. “Our website launched a year before the first print magazine ever came out,” she said. “We started to build momentum online first, and then we were able to convert them to print.”
The editorial operation runs in two distinct tracks. A quarterly cycle prioritizes depth, design, and evergreen storytelling. The digital team, led by a dedicated editor, moves quickly on events, openings, news, and service content, anchored by a weekly newsletter. “We plan our digital content tracker three months in advance now,” Faist said. “Press week is always press week, you are selling last minute, proofreading, fact checking, all of it. The balance is making sure we are not silent on digital or social when print peaks.”
The system depends on a core team that has grown together. “My editor, art director, digital editor, sales director, they have been with me for six, seven, eight years,” Faist said. “We will always get it done. Forty-seven times now we have gotten it to press and we are happy with it.”
Social reach, and a close call with the algorithms
The social audience behaves differently from print and web, and Faist treats it that way. “It almost has its own audience really,” she said. Instagram is the strongest channel, unsurprising in a food city where photography drives discovery and inspiration. Conversion from social to site traffic remains a challenge many publishers share, but the commercial opportunity is clear. Advertisers want their messages distributed under a trusted halo. “We do a lot of Meta social campaigns under the Foodism payload,” she said. “If I put these under a Foodism halo, it is getting that authority, it is feeling like it resonates more with the audience.”
There was a moment in 2024 when that reach was threatened. “We were accidentally [blocked] for a while,” Faist said. “We were somehow looped into the news category and it took me three weeks of appealing and getting to the head person at Meta to say, look at this, we are not news. They reversed it and we have been in the clear ever since.”
Events as a high-impact touchpoint
The editorial calendar now includes a signature gathering that serves readers, partners, and the broader hospitality community. The Foodism ICON Awards return for their third year on November 25 at the Fairmont Royal York. “Our tagline is ten industry titans, ten awards, one incredible night,” Faist said. Categories include sustainability, DEI, mentorship, mixology, and a legendary honour, with winners kept secret until the show.
Sponsors activate on site behind the bar, at stations, on stage, and through experience moments, including a tourism prize. “Brands want to be on the ground sampling their products, talking to the right people and to our readers and industry VIPs,” she said. “We deliver all of that on one big night, and we include Foodism media as part of it so you get longevity over Q4.”
Faist draws on an earlier career in marketing to shape the evening, supported by an event management firm that handles permits, logistics, and the long list of operational details. “This is the stuff you pay for,” she said, describing a morning when the team produced a Fairmont special-occasion permit within minutes. “Overall direction still comes from me, but if we do not need to outsource it, we absorb it.”
Distribution, costs, and the print reality today
If the product and community are clear strengths, the economics of print remain a moving target. Paper and printing costs climbed during the pandemic and have not returned to old levels. “They increased by one hundred percent during COVID,” Faist said. “Now I would say we have come back to paying probably forty percent more.” The company switched printers a couple of years ago after running an RFP to manage cost pressures.
Distribution is led by Canada Post, blending targeted direct mail with a curated VIP list of roughly three thousand recipients. Labour disruptions have been manageable so far. “One strike delayed us by a week or two, but that was it,” she said. Quarterly timing has helped avoid the worst of it. The model, hungry as it is, still makes strategic sense in a crowded digital market. Physical placement is a competitive moat and a tangible proof of value for partners.
AI’s promise, and the line the brand will not cross
Artificial intelligence has entered nearly every publishing conversation, and Faist is blunt about what it will and will not be allowed to do inside her shop. “We do not write anything using AI that goes into the magazine,” she said. “We do not write anything with AI that goes into the website or our newsletter.” The team has experimented with fact checking and found the double-checking erased the gain. Where AI has stuck is in research, process, work-backs, and creative mock-ups that help win pitches. “Once we sell people in on the mood boards, we then go and shoot everything authentically ourselves,” she said. “It will never replace my team. Our editorial voice has to be trusted.”
Like many publishers, she is monitoring the other side of the AI debate, the one that reshapes traffic by answering readers’ questions directly. “We are seeing our traffic numbers massively impacted,” she said. “The most authoritative sites are suffering the most because people do not need to go to our site to confirm anything now. We are watching what happens with Google and with the larger lawsuits.”
Why it matters to Canadian retail and hospitality
The mechanics of Faist’s model matter to more than media observers. For retailers and brands, the approach maps to how consumers discover and decide where to spend. A Toronto-led, hospitality-heavy audience is a high-intent cohort for dining, drink, travel, and lifestyle categories, and it is often the same audience that shops urban high streets and mixed-use centres. The omnichannel packaging, which brings together a quarterly magazine, a fast digital cadence, targeted social distribution, and a moment to meet in person, gives marketers multiple ways to move the needle.
The nuance is hyperlocal relevance. A national campaign has its place, Faist said, but so does a district-level activation that points people to specific neighbourhood events and businesses. That is what Foodism can deliver at scale in Toronto. It is also why a single-city focus can be more powerful than spreading thin across many markets without matching budget increases.
The next ten years, with eyes wide open
Independent publishing is rarely a straight line. The last decade brought a pandemic, supply shocks, labour disruptions, and platform pivots that would have undone many operators. Faist describes the present as both challenging and energizing, with a steady team and a clear rhythm to how issues and campaigns get made. Predicting the future is hard. “It is impossible right now to predict,” she said. “We would not have predicted the pandemic, Canada Post strikes, or anything else. There is a lot to look around and be aware of.”
That awareness has not cooled her conviction. She has built an organization that treats print as a signal of quality, digital as a daily service, social as reach, and events as community. She hires people she can trust, and she keeps creative standards tight, even when advertisers pay for control. She is unambiguous about the line on AI, and she is patient about expansion, moving when a real gap appears.
Twenty Two Media is a decade old because it is stubborn about the things that matter and flexible about the things that do not. “We wear a lot of hats,” Faist said. “If we do not need to outsource it, we absorb it. That is how we are where we are.” For readers who still love the feel of a well-made magazine, for brands that need a credible voice to carry their message, and for a city that knows how to eat and travel well, that stubbornness looks like a strategy.
