Food is Now Entertainment-How Live 2.0 is That?

A few years ago, we (at Goldstar) noticed something interesting: people were suddenly excited about going to the spa.

No, really, they were VERY excited.  The spa business was a niche that up to that point was the province of the well-off or the place where you occasionally indulged yourself with a couple hours of pampering.

Then there was the spa boom.

I’d mark its beginning at about 2004.  Pretty soon, instead of one place to get a massage or a facial in town, there were 5, then 10.  The trend was very powerful.

It was no longer about getting the treatments themselves.  It was entertainment, which is why we sold it on the Goldstar site.

I hereby declare that something similar is happening with food events.  Starting a year or so ago, events where food is the primary star suddenly hit our radar screen as being very much in the zeitgeist.  Oh, we always had the occasional wine-tasting event or dinner and a mariachi show type of event, but the change was that it was now the food itself that was the star of the show.

A few days ago, a WSJ article confirmed what we’ve been talking about for a while: the blending of food with live entertainment is now total.

Here’s a key tidbit:

“Mr. [Guy] Fieri is not a rock-band frontman, a pop star or a rapper. He’s a chef. His show will consist of him making things like jambalaya sandwiches at 21 concert venues around the country, in spaces with up to 5,500 seats.

Live performance is a booming business for celebrity chefs, who themselves are a thriving niche of the entertainment world, straddling television, publishing and retail and generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. For years, chefs have staged cooking demonstrations at food festivals around the country, often for charitable causes and usually free. These days, top food personalities are charging audiences up to $250 a ticket to watch them cook, hear them banter and, some of the time, eat their food. Speaker-booking agencies that specialize in top authors and former politicians are now promoting chefs. Some chefs are packing in crowds of thousands per live show.

“It’s easily the most lucrative part of what I do,” says chef Anthony Bourdain, who was paid for about 25 live appearances in the past year and plans to do 40 in the next year. He says the majority of his income now comes from live appearances, rather than his show on the Travel Channel, “No Reservations,” or from sales of his books.

There’s even an anecdote in the story of one woman who follows Chef Alton Brown around the country like an old-fashioned Deadhead.

What I’m telling you is that it hasn’t always been this way.  In fact, “In its early years, the Food Network had a Food Network Live division devoted to staging performances for its chefs, but shut it doors in 2002 due to lack of interest in most of the channel’s performers.”

This is another example of the strength of the Live 2.0 societal megatrend.  Running up to 2002, it was too early.  The value of live entertainment versus recorded/broadcast entertainment had not switched places fully yet, and so I’m not surprised it didn’t work.

But those days are past, and if Anthony Bourdain, who has a TV show, books, and generally massive amounts of media coverage, is saying that live performances (and they ARE performances) are the most lucrative part of his career, you should understand that something big is happening here.

And it’s isn’t strictly speaking about food.  It’s about live performance.

But it’s also about food.  I believe this trend has the potential to have more staying power than the spa boom because food is, well, a need, and a $120 massage is not.  People eat all the time, and so there’s always a baseline of interest in finding something that’s not boring.

On the other hand, there’s a danger that as the popularity builds, more and more people will enter the business without a good reason to be there, except that they see it as a “hot” area.

When this happens, it’s both good and bad.  There’s a greater variety of events available, but the number of truly rank amateurs hanging out a shingle is greater too.  In the case of the spa boom, this means that an experience that used to be almost universally enjoyable became much less so as the industry grew too fast.

So my advice to anyone thinking of trying to make a living on a food event:

1.  Be audience-centered.  Just like every other event, you’ve got to build the audience experience to be a delight.

2.  Get the food part right.  When food events fail, it’s because the food doesn’t match expectations.  Usually, it’s either because there’s not enough or because it’s not as “gourmet” as promised.  My advice would be not to promise the moon.  If you’re feeding hundreds of people (even if it ’s just samples), it’s going to be hard to deliver an elegant experience, so don’t imply that that’s what you’re doing.  And make sure the food you promised is there in the amounts you promised.

3.  Don’t charge too much.  Just because you can command a lot of money right now doesn’t mean it’s in your long term interest to do that.  Charge a good price, but raising the price through the roof does the same thing to expectations, and in my experience, food events are more likely to leave people disappointed (for the reasons above) than regular entertainment events.  If the price is a bit more sane, the audience is more likely to leave happy, feeling as though they got great value.  That’s, ultimately, what’s going to bring them back.

So there you have it.  Chefs are the new rock stars, complete with groupies.  But the really interesting part is that you know they’re rock stars not because they’re on TV, but because they can fill an audience with raving, high-dollar paying fans.

Welcome to the world of Live 2.0.