Hey, guys! This is me, Natalia, a.k.a. Chef Rudakova, and your favourite source of restaurant industry news, social media trends for food content creators and inspiring stories for food industry entrepreneurs is here 🥳 

Let’s dive straight into The Weekly Snack 😉

Top Stories:

• The #1 restaurant in the world 2023 is finally revealed and it breaks all the rules

• Sale of “lab-grown” meat goes legal, but only by 2 companies

• TikTok is ready to battle Amazon and Shein

Trending

• ON YOUTUBE - Nick DiGiovanni’s new cookbook drop - 3.2m+ views in 1 day 😲

• ON INSTAGRAM - Stolen Dance by Sped-O - 35.3k Reels

• ON TIKTOK - #treatyourself - 2.8B views

• ON GOOGLE - Sisters real southern cooking

Industry News Digest

🏆 #1 best restaurant in the world breaks all the rules. The World's 50 Best Restaurants 2023 - full list revealed.

✌🏻 MrBeast wants to “move on” from Beast Burger.

🐻 Bear Season 2 is officially out now.

Just last week we were writing about the Uncommon (lab-grown bacon startup) securing a 30m investment, while the sale of lab-grown meat remains basically globally illegal.

🔬 Well… US regulators finally approved the sale of “lab-grown” chicken meat by 2 Californian companies.

Social Media News Digest

🛍️ TikTok is ready to battle Amazon and Shein with its new online shopping in-app feature “Trendy Beats”.

📢 Need more engagement on your TikTok ads? TikTok just rolled out a new add-ons feature that will boost engagement.

📲 Instagram users will now we able to download publicly posted Reels. Creators still can opt-out and remove permission from their Reels.

👩‍💻 Link history is now a thing on Instagram.

📖 Now you can publish a whole book on Twitter, as long as it’s not more than 25k characters long.

👀 Meanwhile, TikTok expands its description limits to 4k characters.

🎥 YouTube is testing out a possibility for Shorts creators to reply with Shorts responsive videos to videos of other creators.

❌ LinkedIn Removes Native Carousels, Profile Videos and In-Image Links.

🤑 Discord goes full creator mode and allows creators to sell downloadable products on the platform.

🛠️ Meanwhile, Patreon also adds e-commerce tools for creators, allowing to sell one-off digital goods and create free fan memberships.

Resources for Digital Food Creators

🛍️ Amazon Prime Day 2023 is upon us: 11-12 July. So, Amazon suggests its creators to get ready, order and create content in advance to make the most out of it.

Check out Most Wished For items on Amazon to get some ideas for your product review content.

Creator Spotlight

Proof Bread by Jonathan Przybyl and Amanda Abou-Eid

Proof Bread is a team of passionate bakers (mostly you see just Jonathan Przybyl though) working in a historic building in downtown Mesa that has been converted into a retail bakery.

In his online content (YouTube and Instagram), Jonathan shares the daily life of a sourdough bakery, while talking in details about all the processes, challenges and rewards. Everything he bakes is long-fermented with Proof Bread’s sourdough starter ‘Harriet’. Each product is artisan, crafted by hand, from the best local ingredients, with no shortcuts.

👉 If you are a Food Content Creator or know a Creator that’s worth mentioning in the next issue of The Weekly Snack, please reply back to this email and send me the details.

This section of the newsletter is FOR YOU! I care & I share 🫶

Video of the week

Success Story

54-year-old Andrea Castrovillari makes $9k per month from her food blog.

Andrea Castrovillari runs a single food blog, Cooking with Mamma C, which she had started in 2014, got accepted into Mediavine in 2016 and hit 2m monthly pageviews in 2022.

She spends about 25 hours per week on the generation of new content and curation of her web blog.

Andrea’s main income streams are mostly ad revenue, affiliate income from Amazon and e-book sales.

And her marketing strategy focus is towards social currency (testimonials, publicaitons in prestigious media outlets), SM, SEO and backlink building.

Food blogging goals? 🤔

What I’m Watching Right Now

And that’s it for this week!

Let me know (you can reply right back to this email) if you liked this issue of The Weekly Snack.

What did you like, what you didn’t and what topics you’d like to have covered more/less of?

Have a good one! 🫶