The Food52 Executive Who Used the Company Credit Card for Everything

Shannon Muldoon, a bright and vibrant media executive, lived a life of unquiet luxury. She bought the best clothes, ate at the best restaurants, vacationed in beautiful places, and put it all on Instagram. She worked out at the same private training gym as influencers and reality-television stars. She flaunted her lifestyle to her colleagues at recipe and lifestyle website Food52, where she ran Studio52, the content studio that handled production for brand partnerships. “She would talk about it, she would wear it, she would tell us about her couch that’s vintage from Italy,” said one former staffer. “We knew all of it. We just didn’t know how she was purchasing it.” With the company credit card, as it turned out.

Between 2021 and 2023, Muldoon stole more than $270,000 from Food52, including $126,000 worth of luxury clothing from Net-a-Porter and more than $17,000 worth of flights on Delta, according to court documents, though the total amount stolen is probably much greater. Last August, a grand jury in New York indicted her for one count of grand larceny in the second degree. Earlier this summer, Muldoon, 38, took a plea for five years’ probation. She has already paid $15,000 in restitution but may be subject to additional financial penalties of up to $262,000 and will be sentenced in September.

Muldoon, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, was hired at Food52 for a client-services and ad-operations role just before the pandemic struck in early 2020. Some questioned whether she had the relevant experience. “But she had some major places on her résumé,” said a former staffer. “She had worked at Bon Appétit prior, and she had a bunch of stories about those times, and she said she’d worked at the New York Times and Wayfair.” (The Times confirmed her employment as a producer for T Brand Studio.) At the time of Muldoon’s hire, Food52, which like all food-media websites has for years been struggling to remain relevant as Google fiddles with its algorithm and culinary stars take their talents to YouTube and TikTok, decided to scale up its brand-partnership business, which required the creation of an in-house creative studio. In the fall of 2020, Muldoon became the director of the studio, overseeing the budget for marketing and brand campaigns. With that role came a corporate card to use for business-related purchases including props, food and beverages, and authorized travel.

A few months later, her colleagues began to notice a change in Muldoon’s appearance. “Her clothes started getting better; her nail art was crazy; she got a lot of Botox. You could just tell she was going through a transformation,” said one former staffer. She often worked remote, despite her job being primarily in-studio, beaming into Zoom calls from a beach bungalow with a Chanel clip in her hair. “She’d sent me Farfetch links for crazy Gucci jackets and be like, ‘Should I do it? I might!’” recalled another former staffer. “Shannon was very brazen with her purchases, just showing them off to the world.”

People started wondering how she could afford her lifestyle, which was constantly on display on Instagram: the trips to Copenhagen, a tropical wellness retreat, and Malibu; the clothes and the accessories. “I would sometimes ask where she got a bag or a pair of shoes, and the amount of times she would answer ‘The Row’ shocked me,” a former colleague recalled. “I mean, we work in media. What the fuck?” But people rarely asked questions because, among other things, Muldoon was sweet and generous, buying her colleagues holiday gifts from Coming Soon and taking them out to elaborate dinners. It seemed to her colleagues that she was increasingly using the card for everything. One former staffer who worked remotely said that Muldoon encouraged them to come to New York often, even though that wasn’t part of their hiring agreement, telling them to put their hotel and car rentals on her card.

She also seemed to be fixated on social status, boasting about hanging out with Alison Roman, who was a close friend of her then-boyfriend. Parts of her past didn’t make sense: She claimed she’d been a Rockette but didn’t have any pictures from that time; she told some colleagues she had grown up in Manhattan and others that she was from New Jersey.

At first Muldoon’s theft wasn’t so conspicuous — they were for amounts that would make sense with vendors the company normally did business with or could use for a shoot. But then the charges became egregious, from merchants Food52 had no need for, such as the LIV Method, a private training gym popular among influencers, or Net-a-Porter, the online luxury-fashion retailer where, according to internal accounting, Muldoon spent nearly $20,000 in a single month, despite the fact that Food52 did not dress talent.

Meanwhile, Food52 was starting to falter. After massive growth during the pandemic, when it eventually achieved profitability, the company doubled down on its commerce business, acquiring the cookware company Dansk and the lifestyle-goods company Schoolhouse and announcing plans to open a brick-and-mortar store in New York. Its headquarters were relocated to a massive, swanky office at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Yet the site was then hit by the volatility that has rocked the entire media industry, and it seemed to be in a constant state of restructuring and strategic pivots, with rounds of layoffs. There was also a revolving door of C-suite executives that included CEO Amanda Hesser naming a co-CEO, Alex Bellos, in 2022, who then stepped down a mere year later. This shambolic state of affairs apparently allowed Muldoon’s ’90s-era Vanity Fair–style grift to go unnoticed. (Food52, which is now led by CEO Erika Ayers Badan, declined to comment for this story.)

In late 2022, as part of one such restructuring, Studio52 was dissolved, with its team members either moved into the editorial department or reabsorbed by the broader brand-partnerships umbrella. Muldoon successfully pitched herself for a new role overseeing talent booking and management and was moved to a different team, reporting to a new manager by January 2023. “She kind of goes off the brand-partnerships team, but her credit card is still going and still attached to all of our production,” said one former staffer. “We were like, ‘Why are our videos so expensive? Can we get a report?’ We were trying to see it on a higher level, but didn’t have access to her personal credit-card statements — that was just her boss and the finance department.”

The company, which used the program Expensify to track expenses, had different job codes that related to each advertising campaign, and as long as the team was coming in at budget and everything was coded appropriately, the reports were accepted. Muldoon seems to have coded her fraudulent expenses to make them appear related to the advertising campaigns she oversaw. Plus brand partnerships was a big business, and the division was still hitting its margins and goals enough of the time despite the money Muldoon was spending on herself. “She was smart about categorizing her expenses per client, and that was a way of not getting flagged. It definitely required some intention and work on her end,” a former staffer said.

By 2023, Muldoon’s colleagues had begun to hear less and less from her. She seemed to sense the jig was about to be up, telling them she was worried her job was at risk. In March of that year, she went on a monthlong medical leave and told some colleagues she’d been experiencing migraines and that the doctors thought it could be multiple sclerosis. She posted an Instagram Story visible only to Close Friends — which included many of her Food52 colleagues — of herself in the hospital. Her friends at work worried for her and frequently checked in with offers to help.

In Muldoon’s absence, it fell to colleagues to file her expenses. At one point, one of the staffers working on the report noted in a Slack channel that they couldn’t account for charges on Muldoon’s card to the sneaker reseller StockX: a $1,589.05 charge that had appeared to have already been refunded along with a $196.32 purchase from the same retailer. Muldoon chimed in from medical leave to say that she was in touch with someone from accounting because “these are suspicious if you ask me,” she wrote. “Looks like it was def not a real charge bc it’s charged and then refunded?”

The whole exchange struck colleagues as strange. “It was like, You’re on medical leave, you shouldn’t be responding to anything on Slack,” a former colleague recalled. “The second that happened, we’re like, Okay, something is up,” said another. And Muldoon’s new manager noticed that other parts of her expense report didn’t add up, such as thousands of dollars in Delta charges and other online shopping. The new boss asked the team if, when purchasing wardrobe for talent, it was returned after — only to be told that Food52 did not purchase wardrobe for talent at all. He flagged it to finance.

“Food52 was always changing. Any other place, your finances are so closely tracked,” a former staffer said. “And brand partnerships was doing so well: It was something no one believed in, and we were making all of this money for the company.”

Around the same time, the finance department asked some staffers to comb through Muldoon’s previous expenses and note anything they couldn’t account for. At that point, they realized there were hundreds of thousands of dollars in suspicious spending. Right before Muldoon was scheduled to come back from her medical leave, she told a colleague that she had requested more time off, which the company denied. When she came back, she was terminated. Colleagues were told that she had been fired for misuse of company funds. Three months later, she was on a flight to Mexico that she had paid for on the company card when she was still at Food52.

To her old colleagues, it seemed like Muldoon had gotten away with it. “She basically walked away with all of the clothes. And the memories,” said a former staffer. While she had blocked most of her former colleagues on social media, some still had access, watching in awe as she ran the New York City Marathon despite her alleged medical issues and relocated to Los Angeles. In February 2024, she was hired at Substack as its podcast and video acquisition-and-development lead. She was employed for fewer than 90 days.

But the situation was in fact brought to the attention of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which began preparing its case. Court records show that, even though Muldoon got caught, she did get away with a lot. “The $270,000 in unauthorized purchases is a very conservative estimate as to Ms. Muldoon’s theft,” the statement of facts reads. “Our investigation showed additional unauthorized purchases from other luxury clothing brands, furniture companies, and other travel related charges.” The revelations have come just as Food52’s woes have worsened: In March, it announced it was culling 40 percent of its workforce, while Hesser, who had remained executive chair, parted ways with the company she co-founded in May.

“Her last purchase could’ve been her smartest — a one-way flight to some place far away,” said a former staffer. “She should’ve fled the country when she had the chance.”