Bethenny Frankel has revealed that her current career as a social media food and beauty influencer is her most lucrative venture yet, eclipsing the multi-million dollar business empire she previously built.
Speaking to the Daily Mail at a pop-up event in the Hamptons for her new Supermodel food brand, the 55-year-old former Real Housewives of New York City star confirmed that her influencing income has surpassed the peak earnings of her famous Skinnygirl company.
Frankel launched Skinnygirl Cocktails in 2009 before selling the spirit brand for over $100 million just two years later. However, she stated that her current work on social platforms generates even higher returns. "My biggest year of Skinnygirl is not as big as this," Frankel said. "It's out of control. It's amazing. It's the most successful I've ever been by far."
Her new enterprise, Supermodel, offers a line of low-calorie bagels, spreads, and coffees. The product line was developed directly from the viral snacks and food hacks she has shared with followers online over the past few years. Frankel explained that she plans to expand Supermodel into multiple food categories featuring nationwide distribution, standalone retail stores, and cafes. She added that she "100%" foresees the brand becoming larger than Skinnygirl, with the business currently on track to surpass her previous empire.
Supermodel Cafe Pop-Up Launch
To showcase her new product line, Frankel launched the first Supermodel Cafe pop-up event in the Hamptons on Thursday. Fans flooded the venue as the temporary location opened its doors at 481 Montauk Highway in East Quogue, New York. The pop-up will remain open to the public through September 12.
East Quogue is a hamlet situated along the South Shore of Long Island, located within the town of Southampton. The region, broadly known as the Hamptons, serves as an upscale summer resort destination for prominent figures from business and entertainment.
The Supermodel Cafe features healthier alternatives to several of Frankel's favorite personal indulgences, including bagels, cheesecake, and her custom chicken salad recipe. The menu offers protein-forward, 150-calorie bagels created in collaboration with regional bakery partner Goldberg's Bagels, a long-standing New York establishment famous for traditional hand-rolled baked goods.
Frankel also highlighted her signature chicken salad recipe, which incorporates half the amount of mayonnaise found in standard preparations. "The chicken salad is better for you but it doesn't taste like it is and it's so good for you," she explained during the launch event.
For customers seeking luxury items, the pop-up menu includes two special caviar-laced bagels priced around $40. The "Rage Bait" bagel is offered at $38, while the "Nepo Baby" bagel retails at an eye-watering $43. Dessert offerings include a gluten-free cheesecake containing 10 grams of protein and 102 calories. In addition, the cafe serves six signature lattes created alongside coffee technology partner Cumulus.
Social Media Earnings and TV Returns
Frankel's transition into full-time digital content creation has proven extraordinarily profitable. During an interview in May on Emma Grede's Aspire podcast, Frankel revealed that she earns over $20 million per year strictly from brand deals and social media influencing alone.
Grede is an executive and entrepreneur best known as the co-founder of apparel companies Good American and Skims. Her business-focused podcast frequently features conversations with founders, executives, and media personalities discussing financial growth and corporate strategy.
Despite her commercial success on social media, Frankel has remained selective about returning to network television. In March, she revealed that she turned down an opportunity to reunite with her former castmates on The Golden Life, an upcoming reality television series produced for the E! network. E! Entertainment Television is an American basic cable channel primarily focused on pop-culture news and unscripted programming.
Frankel reasoned that returning to unscripted television could potentially be bad for business at this stage in her corporate career. She also noted that the E! network "could presumably never pay" the compensation figure she requested.
However, Frankel shocked fans of The Real Housewives of New York City just one month later in April by reuniting with former co-stars Ramona Singer and Sonja Morgan. The trio traveled to Paris to shoot a high-budget advertising campaign for dermatological brand RoC Skincare.
RoC Skincare is an established French skincare company founded in 1957, widely recognized for developing over-the-counter anti-aging products and dermatological formulations. The Real Housewives of New York City, which aired on Bravo, tracked the personal and professional lives of several affluent Manhattan women, where Frankel, Singer, and Morgan shared a complex on-screen dynamic for multiple seasons.
Speaking to the Daily Mail about her decision to collaborate with her former castmates, Frankel described the Paris commercial shoot as both financially lucrative and personally therapeutic. "I got to heal all the woundings of the toxicity of reality TV and everybody won," she explained. "They won, they made money, they got to be relevant in a modern commercial. I won, RoC won, we all win." She added that Singer and Morgan were "thrilled" with their payout from the skincare deal.
Building the Skinnygirl Empire
Frankel first rose to national prominence in 2005 as a contestant on NBC's reality competition series The Apprentice: Martha Stewart. Hosted by lifestyle authority Martha Stewart, the show evaluated contestants on business acumen and execution, with Frankel finishing as the first runner-up.
A few years after her appearance on NBC, Frankel was cast in the inaugural season of Bravo's The Real Housewives of New York City, quickly establishing herself as the breakout star of the franchise.
In 2009, she leveraged her television platform to launch Skinnygirl Cocktails, a line of pre-mixed low-calorie alcoholic beverages. Just two years later, in 2011, she finalized a deal to sell the cocktail business to Beam Global for an estimated sum between $100 million and $120 million. Beam Global, a major global spirits company known for producing Jim Beam bourbon, acquired the spirit line during a period of rapid market growth for low-calorie alcohol products.
Crucially, Frankel retained the rights to the Skinnygirl brand name across all non-alcoholic product categories. In the years following the sale, she expanded the brand name into a vast consumer portfolio, licensing and producing items such as denim, eyewear, deli meats, popcorn, salad dressing, and shapewear.
With her new Supermodel brand expanding into retail cafes and nationwide food distribution, Frankel maintains that her current influencer-led business model is positioned to surpass all of her previous entrepreneurial benchmarks.
