…you get a bit of beef.
Twitch. You know, that little old streaming platform for gamers? Bought by Amazon for $970 million in 2014? Yeah, that one. While you may know of Twitch, you’ve probably never used it unless you’re a gamer. And even if you are a Twitch user, you probably didn’t know that the Food & Drink category existed. After many conversations with F&D Twitch folk over the last several months we’ve gotten familiar with the goods and the bads, are here to spill a little tea.
All day, every day, there’s a small group of entertaining chefs and home cooks that livestream themselves baking, sautéing, simmering, and chopping in their kitchens, which are laden with their own web cams, led lights, and mics. Unlike big gaming streamers on Twitch, for F&D, the revenue potential isn’t great. They make a few bucks from fan donations and ad revenue if they’ve made Affiliate or Partner status, but for the most part, it’s not enough to merit quitting their day jobs. Like any creator career, growing is grueling. One streamer shared that in his 10 short months of streaming thus far, he streams 6 days a week in order to grow to the point where he can actually start thinking about monetizing. Most importantly, visibility for F&B to the 15 million daily active users on Twitch is pathetic. Twitch has done very little to increase exposure for this category, clearly choosing to focus on games, esports, and music over anything else. To put the size into context, the 3 most popular categories on Twitch are
#1 Just Chatting (310k avg. viewers this month),
#2 Grand Theft Auto (206k viewers avg. this month), and
#3 League of Legends (152k avg. viewers this month).
Food & Drink ranks all the way down at #103 with 2.4k avg. viewers this month. Besides Food Beast, a highly produced, comedic food competition channel, the most watched channels are just 24/7 streams of old food TV shows such as Anthony Bourdain and Iron Chef.
Some chef streamers have cunningly categorized their cooking streams as Just Chatting for this reason, only to be condemned by other F&D streamers for mitigating reach for the F&D category. While lack of visibility, support, and exposure from Twitch are huge pain points for streamers in F&D, what they do have is an impressively ironclad community-oriented culture— I’ve never seen anything like it on any other platform. The level of engagement and loyalty is achieved through religiously tuning each other’s streams, attending weekly support group sessions, and regularly pinging tips, tricks, shoutouts, and banter in their Discord channels.
One streamer in particular has established himself as a leader within this community by striving to be as welcoming, inclusive, helpful, and supportive as he can be to nascent streamers entering this category. Logan or ‘Ingrediology’ is a self-taught expert in livestream setup and production, professionally trained chef, and one of the few truly business minded streamers in F&D. Other cooking streamers certainly look to him for guidance as they navigate the Wild Wild West that is Twitch.
Logan sees an opportunity to meaningfully increase his revenue if he can create value beyond just live entertainment, and have full ownership of all transactions outside of the Amazon/Twitch chokehold. He has taken the leap from nudging for and relying on gifts from his fans, and has built an interactive meal kit company which sells cook-along boxes. So far he and his small team at Ingrediology have sold pizza, brownie, and soft pretzel baking kits, and have plans for a Christmas cookie box next month.
Each box is sold in connection with a show that includes trivia, musical guests, and fun, interactive step by step baking instructions. His last event, Pizza Party, attracted almost 1000 viewers, which is a big success in comparison to the average viewership of an F&D stream. Next Sunday the 3rd is his Oktoberfest themed event for the pretzel baking kit, proceeds from which will be donated to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society — an organization that the Food & Drink category actively partners with. Surprisingly, Twitch plans to feature the Oktoberfest stream on the home page of Twitch that day. Perhaps Twitch is starting to fear they may lose the F&D category to a competitive platform? Likely not, at least for now. But it will be interesting to see how much more traction Ingrediology will get for this placement.
Until then, Ingrediology will be doing a preliminary run of the Oktoberfest bake-along on Crafted on Sunday September 26th at 4 PM ET. Sign up for our waitlist to receive a text invitation to the event.
