After spending over a year in the trenches with food creators and cooking enthusiasts of many different flavors (see what I did there), I am here to report that ‘virtual social cooking’ is very much a thing. Here’s why you should care: The way people are cooking together via the internet speaks volumes to exciting shifts happening for the average consumer.
Covid drastically accelerated the adoption of remote working and livestreaming tech, forcing people to get comfortable watching concerts, having team meetings, visiting the doctor, going to school, and shopping remotely. Being isolated also led us to seek social interaction online, playing well into the imminent migration away from industry social media platforms that we joined initially to connect with people we already knew, to vertical social networks where we can indulge our specific interests by meeting new people who share them (think Strava, GoodReads, Newness).
A longer tail transformation Americans have been enduring over the last 15 years is going from complacency with the standard American diet to striving for true food identities. We’ve experienced a newfound curiosity for authentic cuisines, as we are actively curious to learn more about our own ethnicities and cultures. More recently, we’ve become more cognizant of where our ingredients come from and how diet impacts our health and the environment. Not to mention we’re cooking over 11% more meals at home than we were before the pandemic. A renaissance of home cooking is also sustained by the growth of online grocery shopping and greater access to a wider variety of ingredients.
There are 3 main platforms types we’ve seen where these trends and behaviors are manifesting in how we consume food content and cook: recipe based, discussion based, and video based platforms.
Recipe Based
In 2020 and 2021, a flurry of cooking apps launched in the App Store, including Pepper and Manna. They both are building a social media network exclusively for recipes, facilitating recipe creation and sharing by anyone. The appeal is that you can access recipes cleanly and quickly without the clunky features of blog recipes — ads, preceding narratives, etc.
Pepper
Also known as “Instagram for recipes,” was founded in New York in 2020. They have over 400 reviews in the App Store and tout an overall rating of 5 stars.
Manna
Manna is a dynamic recipe repository founded in 2019. The founders are Entrepreneurs in Residence at Interplay Ventures, and have raised $150k through WeFunder.
Chat and Discussion Based
A less structured but oddly specific gathering of foodies exists in the decentralization of food communities across a number of platforms. They engage in daily communication via freeform chat and discussion. A community can be topic-led, creator-led, or brand-led (did you know the Instant Pot Facebook community has over 3 million members?!). Here are a few notable examples:
Discord / Metaverse
YouTube star Joshua Weissman has a Discord community of over 40k members, managed by a team of moderators. This is a place for his biggest fans to share their own creations, get exclusive access to content, and be the first to hear of exciting updates.
Celebrity chef Tom Colicchio has also built a community for food fans and their favorite chefs to launch his collection of NFTs communities “focused on connecting holders with their favorite chefs and foods,” as quoted on Twitter. His Discord server currently has 1200 members.
Facebook Groups
If you’re a millennial retired from Facebook you may be surprised to hear that Facebook Groups continue to thrive! From Non-Veg Indian Cooking to Soul Food Recipes to Organic Homemade Baby Food Mammas and everything in between, foodies are taking their food niches very seriously. Similar to Reddit, what makes these groups run is strict community guidelines that are diligently followed by members and admins. Some of the first movers in the food blogging community have grown their FB groups enormously, and use that audience to funnel traffic over to their blog that is highly optimized for search and ad revenue.
While r/Food and r/FoodPorn are the two largest food subreddits, Reddit is home to more niche foodie communities like r/RawVegan, r/HomeBrewing, and r/IndianFood, where thoughtful and candid discussion around specific cuisines is happening every day.
Video based
Perhaps the most interesting and most nascent is video-based communities. Let’s discuss in order of lowest tech to highest tech.
Zoom
Pre-pandemic, a founder friend of mine participated in monthly cooking marathons with 10 of her friends. Once they decided on a cultural cuisine — sometimes as niche as Mississippi Chinese — they selected a handful of recipes, divided and conquered ingredient procurement, and cooked together for 5 hours. Cuisines were influenced by peoples’ recent travels or readings. When Covid hit, they were forced to move the whole operation to Zoom. It works, but is clunky. They often think: is there a comprehensive tech solution for their logistically challenging hobby?
With each new video feature came a new surge in cooking content on Instagram. While Reels are best for short, aesthetically pleasing cooking videos, engagement lasts seconds, and entertainment value is fleeting and quickly forgotten with the upward swipe of the thumb. When it comes to building genuine connection with fans, IG live and talking Story videos are most effective. Doing so with food became sensational over the course of the pandemic as chefs, influencers, and celebrities took to Instagram to show off their home cooking. Florence Pugh, Antoni Porowski, Stanley Tucci, and Chrissy Tiegen are just a few celebs who have spearheaded the movement with their captivating and hilarious cooking segments on IG Stories and Live.
TikTok
And obviously, there’s TikTok. In just the last 2 years, TikTok has birthed food stars that have arguably become just as big as the Food Network breed. While people like Tabitha Brown have grown a loyal following for their infectiously heartwarming personalities, others have gotten big from microwaving salmon and rice. More recently, TikTok Live is coming to the fore as a respected livestreaming platform. While I’m curious to see if it does take off for the food community, there are some decent cooking lives that may strike your fancy today. Tasty does a good job of creating steady streaming content by inviting FoodTokers like Joe Sasto and Gochuzhe to do live cooking demo collabs.
Crafted
The normalization of a chef or personality livestreaming themselves cooking was accelerated by the pandemic. Professional chefs are still bootstrapping their own virtual cooking classes on Zoom, selling them to corporate clients and AirBnB Experience users. Creators on Twitch are doing cooking streams to highly engaged gamer-foodies, grinding to grow their audience so they can become Twitch Partners and earn a slice of ad revenue. And we, over here at Crafted, are running community-driven livestream events on our own dedicated platform for passionate home cooks. Think: Sri Lankan expats in the USA, vegan Thai lovers, Punjabi cooking enthusiasts.
Saying I’m passionate about what I’m building at Crafted because food brings people together sounds like a cliché, doesn’t it? And nothing new, food has been bringing people together since people came into existence. But the many tailwinds that are nudging social media users, home cooks, and content creators now poise us for new behaviors that facilitate genuine connection and indulgence in culture. I imagine a world where we get excited to actively engage our specific interests and hobbies, seek out new people to meet and build relationships with, and improve our skills through face-to-face instruction via livestream. This behavior is already being seeded by the collaborative, authentic, and curious activity happening across various online media and platforms. Forces like Crafted will key in the broader establishment and adoption of virtual social cooking. Be part of the narrative by becoming one of the first members of Crafted’s community.
-Sarah (Co-founder, Crafted)
