Free food, getting paid to post and hundreds of thousands of social followers. A look into the world of food influencers.
In more than 20 years at his family’s restaurant, Joel Gonzalez had never seen anything like it. Around 6 p.m. on March 25, 2021, he looked up to find a line stretching out the door of Mariscos Corona, the Van Nuys restaurant he runs with his sister. For the next two hours, the siblings did their best to manage the surge of customers eagerly requesting the restaurant’s signature dishes: aguachile-stuffed avocados and surf-and-turf burritos.
Eventually, “one of the customers that [first] day told me that he had seen our restaurant on @firstdateguide,” Gonzalez says. “That’s when we put it together.” Food influencers come in many varieties: There are the home cooks who post how-to videos of dishes, mukbangers who livestream themselves eating, newbies looking for free food, marketing professionals with restaurant clients, gourmands who review food in their cars, and food obsessives who just like to share what they’re eating. Some influencers have agents and make a living through brand and restaurant deals. Others do it for the free products and perks.
of the interaction on Instagram. The influencer requested $100 to pay for food he wanted to feature in a video, but the restaurant declined.Antonio Malik, known online as @antonio_eats_la, visited anyway and posted an Instagram story review to his hundreds of thousands of followers. He complimented the service but had some not-so-nice things to say about the food: “Worst dumplings ever!”
The Federal Trade Commission has guidelines in place for influencers, though the process is still very much self-regulated. In a document titled “,” accessible on the FTC website, there are clear instructions for when and how users should disclose a relationship with a brand partner on social media. If you have any familial, financial, employment or personal relationship with a brand, you must disclose it.
Ahaiwe says she turns to another user-generated resource — Yelp reviews — to vet restaurants ahead of time. While influencers like Rodriguez won’t knock a restaurant’s food, there are plenty of influencers who will. With multiple Michelin stars and a busy dining room, Techamuanvivit says, she’s in a position to speak up for the restaurants that can’t.
Despite his experience, Hernandez, for the most part, is not only pro-food influencer, he’s built them into his restaurant’s marketing plans.He’d hired Rodriguez, Castro and Harper in March 2020, as he was getting ready to open a restaurant in La Habra, Calif. The influencers strategize and host events for Hernandez’s restaurants, participate in quarterly meetings and provide feedback on everything, from the atmosphere to the food.
Kristin Diehl, a professor of marketing at USC Marshall School of Business, categorizes influencers as a part of marketing that falls under a larger communications umbrella.brands, she says it’s micro-influencers, people with around 10,000 to 50,000 followers and high engagement, who tend to have the most influence when it comes to restaurants.
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