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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food video

Exclusive: Tastemade Acquiring Dining and Drinking Guides Platform ChefsFeed

Food media company Tastemade announced today that it is acquiring dining and drinking guide platform ChefsFeed. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Tastemade is the company behind a number of food, travel and home design-related video shows including Broken Bread with Roy Choi, Make This Tonight and Thirsty For.

ChefsFeed uses culinary experts to create a variety of different types of food- and drink-related content, including restaurant and bar guides for cities around the world, video recipes, mini-documentaries and live-streamed cooking classes.

In a press statement emailed to The Spoon, Tastemade said this acquisition will give the 6,000-plus culinary experts (chefs, mixologists, sommeliers, etc.) a larger platform on which to share their work.

Food-related video content took on a new purpose this past year as the pandemic limited travel abroad and shut down much of the restaurant industry. Rather than being just aspirational (Maybe I’ll try to make a soufflé some day), food and cooking content became something more necessary. Cooped up in our houses, video was our only way to experience far off places or learn how to cook new types of food.

Online video was also one of ways restaurants themselves tried to pivot. With dining rooms shut down, some restaurants turned to live online cooking classes to generate revenue.

How our relationship with food video content will change as the pandemic recedes remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure: there is a lot pent up desire to travel in people right now. When they’re able to do so more freely again, having expert bar and restaurant guides like those from ChefsFeed for destination cities could prove to be a savvy play by Tastemade.

Want to Make Cool, Modernist Cuisine Style Food Videos? This Kickstarter Might Be for You!

High-end commercials are expert at making you hungry or thirsty — chips literally explode with nacho cheese flavor, orange juice flies across the screen before slowly cascading down perfect cubes of ice.

If you run a scrappy CPG company that has champagne product video tastes but a beer budget, or you just want to make cool food videos a la Modernist Cuisine, then you should check out The Garage Learning online film school project, currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter.

The Garage is offering up a mix of online classes for different levels, in-person workshops (which they say will follow COVID-19-related protocols), and perhaps the coolest part: DIY kits to build things like catapults, LED lighting and sliders.

There are different levels [–OF WHAT?–] available, depending on your existing skillset. The Beginner course teaches you how to use your smartphone video, and there are also 101 classes in lighting, electronics and basic rigging. Intermediate is more for still photographers using DSLR for video as well as special effects and slow motion. The Advanced level teaches higher level motion control, compositing techniques and entrepreneurship.

Prices vary from $29 for one beginner class to $199 for a one year intermediate subscription to $2,999 for everything including the DIY kits. Classes are scheduled to start in June of 2021.

One of the people behind The Garage is Steve Giralt, who sharp-eyed readers might recognize from a video he put out last year about shooting video with robots. The Garage is taking that initial video and really blowing it out into a full-on class.

Being able to put more of a professional polish on product videos would actually be a useful skill for a lot of startup food brands. Hiring creative agencies and video houses is expensive and time consuming, and the ability to create your own videos in-house that make a small up-cycled, plant-based snack bite as alluring as a big chain cheeseburger on TV could be boon for budget conscious entrepreneurs.