Hartford Business Journal

C T I N N O V A T O R S , 2 0 2 3 2 5 COURTNEY At Home Former Food Network President White aims to build industry's premier lifestyle media production company in Stamford >> BY JOEL BERG Aer helping to grow some of the country's most popular cable networks, Courtney White wanted to build something of her own. So, in March 2022, she le her job as president of the Food Network to launch Butternut, a lifestyle media production company based in Connecticut. e fledgling venture brings together several observations White had been making as a cable TV executive. She was seeing innovative approaches to content at smaller outlets and on digital channels. She also saw the need for a woman-led production company in a field that has traditionally been male-dominated, even for shows catering to women audiences. On a personal note, she hoped to combine home and food, realms that were kept separate in her previous roles at HGTV and Food Network. "When I was working only on home, I was curious about food. When I was doing food, I pined for home," she said. en she found the perfect place to bring it all together: A cut-flower farm called Butternut that came up for sale across the street from the farm in Southport where she lived with her husband and three children. "I could really see myself working out of the barn and creating a lifestyle content company in this lifestyle setting," said White. Documentary debut White, a native of Albany, New York, attended film school at New York University with the goal of making narrative films. But as part of her coursework, she worked in multiple genres. Documentaries caught White's attention — and fired her imagination by showing the potential in her Manhattan surroundings. "e city sort of became a collection of film scenes for me," she said. Her passion for the genre deepened aer she graduated and began working on documentaries professionally at HBO. White said she enjoyed digging into her subjects, learning everything she could and fitting it into a limited time. She worked, for example, on documentaries about pets being sold to animal-research labs, and the impact of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on children around the U.S. Aer leaving HBO, she worked for independent production companies making documentaries about people like author Jane Austen and chef Julia Child. Whatever or whoever the subject, White said she looked for ways to make a connection — even when the subject was Pontius Pilate, the Roman official who ordered Jesus Christ's crucifixion. "It became a crash course on spending a few months outside of my own world and my own interests, diving into somebody else's life and just understanding the world through their points of view," she said. en, in 2005, a friend and former boss called her about an opening at HGTV, a relatively small cable channel at the time based in Knoxville, Tennessee. e friend worked at Food Network, a sister channel. White had questions at first. "One of the things I worried about in going to a niche network was, 'Alright, I'm going to be so limited and I'm only going to be doing stories about home, and is that going to run its course?'" she said, acknowledging that she hadn't watched the channel at that point. On the other hand, she was intrigued by the opportunity to work in cable, the side of the business that bought shows, she said. "I felt like even if it were to last two or three years, I would definitely learn a lot," White said. Her friend, meanwhile, pitched her on the smart, committed people who worked there. "I could see how happy she was at Food Network," White said, adding: "at was all it took for me to be interested enough to check it out." She accepted the job, which was based in New York and involved coming up with new concepts for the network. Lifestyle programming passion At the time, HGTV did not have a nationwide reach. But it was adding subscribers and aiming to become a top 10 cable network, "which felt like such a brazen and bold and aggressive goal. We were tiny, and we were niche, and we were the network of watching paint dry," White said. en the network hit on stars and shows that became household names, vaulting the network into prominence: Chip and Joanna Gaines of "Fixer Upper," and John and Drew Scott of "Property Brothers." White went on to work on shows like "Selling Spelling Manor," in which Candy Spelling, widow of late TV producer Aaron Spelling, put their Los Angeles mansion on the market. WHITE Courtney •ite President Butternut Education: Bachelor's degree in film and television, New York University's Tisch School of the Arts Age: 48 Continued on next page

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