UK Food will launch this November, it has been confirmed by Flextech.
"UKFood will be a celebration of food. That’s our real point of difference," says UKTV chief executive Dick Emery.
"The heart of the channel will be about people celebrating food because nowadays food has become such a large subject and such a large part of everybody’s lives.
"Food is something that people are passionate about and we want UKFood to reflect that passion. Television audiences are fragmenting so unless you find something that actually has a passion associated with it, you just end up with fewer audiences for everybody with no real benefit to the consumer or indeed the advertiser."
The channel will air daily from 7am - 7pm in "the majority of multichannel homes", according to a press release.
"The fact that 50% of our programmes are being made especially for us gives us huge scope to try out things that are genuinely new and different," says channel editor Nick Thorogood.
"Every day we’ll be bringing audiences a live studio show that will be an up-to-date, topical magazine show that will, among other things, reflect the food issues that people are talking about.
"If there’s a food scare story like foot and mouth, BSE or salmonella in that morning’s papers we’ll be asking what it all means for the consumer and trying to get to the bottom of it. I hope our live programme will be a forum where people will address the real issues and get some sensible answers. There’ll also be regular phone-ins, consumer news and recipes."
The launch of the channel follows an increase in the popularity of lifestyle station UKstyle, which is now the third most popular of its kind in multichannel homes.
"The success of UKStyle really spurned us on to think about how we could further develop the UKTV offering," adds Emery. "It is an obvious extension because only seven per cent of the programming on Style is actually food programming."
