The cooktop and book sketch an emerging road map for the social-fueled media company: Tasty — and, in a larger sense, BuzzFeed — is trying to become something like the Disney of the digital age, an all-encompassing lifestyle brand that creates content, experiences and products for an audience hooked on phones.

“After the cookbook, I realized that Tasty was neither an experiment nor just a really popular Facebook page with lots of ad revenue,” said Ashley McCollum, Tasty’s general manager. “Really what we’re seeing is how to make a business out of massive intellectual property that was built digital-first. It’s the same model as old-media networks — you make a movie that people love, and then you build a theme park and extend that to products and everything else.”

At BuzzFeed, the overhead video format originated with a team led by Emily Fleischaker, a former food editor at BuzzFeed’s New York office; a team of BuzzFeed producers in Los Angeles then began turning the idea into a blockbuster. So last week, I visited Tasty’s headquarters in Los Angeles.

The ostensible purpose was to see a demo of the cooktop and to get a preview of Tasty’s new app, which is also being released this week. The app is meant to address one of Tasty’s most obvious shortcomings: Because the videos are so short (usually no more than 90 seconds), it can be a bit of a pain to actually make something from a Tasty clip. The app handily streamlines the process; click on a step in a written recipe and it plays just that step in the video.

The cooktop was created by BuzzFeed’s Product Lab, a team charged with inventing “social commerce experiences,” like candles that smell like your hometown or fidget spinners that double as lip gloss. The device was in an early prototype stage when I saw it, but it was far enough along for Tasty’s head chef, Claire King, to cook me a steak and some crème brûlée.

My review: The One Top seems to work really well. (This is a tough job.)

The highlight of the visit, though, was a walk through Tasty’s studio. Picture a long, darkened hallway with a half-dozen workstations, each outfitted with cameras and a sophisticated lighting rig. There are people everywhere — executives, interns and employees’ kids, who often take part in the Tasty Junior videos — but at Tasty there’s one group that matters above all else: the producers.