Hey, guys! This is me, Natalia, a.k.a. Chef Rudakova and your favourite weekly digest of the top food & hospitality industry news, social media trends for food content creators and inspiring stories & tools for your food business, a.k.a. passion is here!

Let’s see what’s in this issue of The Weekly Snack.

Top Stories:

• Grimaceshake is taking over the world

• The Bear Season 2 is slamming all the records

• While TikTok is introducing even more opportunities for creators to make a leaving, it might not be the best strategy for long-term success and best brand deals

Trending

• ON YOUTUBE - Mr. Krabs Burger - 600k views in 9 hours 😲

• ON INSTAGRAM - "Vibes are always happening." - 12.9k Reels

• ON TIKTOK - #grimaceshake - 1.4B views 🤯🤯

• ON GOOGLE - The Cooking Sorcerer +1,300%

Industry News Digest

📈 2nd season of The Bear spikes the viewership 70% making it FX’s most watched Hulu premier.

🛍️ Not only that! But there also was a huge demand among advertisers for native ad placements within the series, with Disney settling on Stella Artois, Coca-Cola and Resy.

🍗 ‘Hot Ones’ celebrates 300 episodes by launching delivery menu alongside Grubhub for the fellow New Yorkers.

🔥 Wood-fired pizza ovens might no longer be pride and joy of NY pizzaiolos. The city ruled crack down on coal and wood-fired pizzerias.

🎨 Talking about pizza, Neapolitans can sleep well again. Naples remains the birthplace of pizza as we know it, as the so-called Pompeii 'Pizza' painting on a 2,000-year-old fresco was announced to be just flatbread.

⚖️ SnapCalorie is a new app the allows you to calculate calories that you eat with a single picture of your meal.

🤑 Do you have a food product business? Here’s a cool, innovative idea on how to effectively promote your product and establish brand affinity among consumers:

1. Collaborate with local restaurants to create menu items involving your product.

2. Launch a membership club on your website, encouraging people to enrol for a daily/weekly delivery from a local restaurant of a meal cooked with your product.

3. Retarget your club members, who already tasted your product and are now ready and happy to purchase it on regular basis for their pantry.

Here’s a great example of Pasta La Mano, that does just that.

Social Media News Digest

📺 YouTube’s thumbnail A/B testing is just around the corner.

🥷 Twitter-killer is also coming soon, mid-July to be precise.

💰 TikTokers can now post subscriber-only videos to their paying subscribers.

👀 What if you didn’t even need to think of what your interest are? What if there was a way for Pinterest to know them without you needing to disclose them? What if Pinterest could automatically curate your platform experience that would perfectly reflect your current interests?

👯‍♀️ Don’t know how to make your Reels stand out? Meta will tell you.

💸 Apparently, you will soon be able to make money even on LinkedIn as a content creator.

✅ The amount of verified accounts on Facebook and Instagram will very soon get SIGNIFICANTLY higher.

@tiktoknewsroom

⭐️TikTok Creative Challenge⭐️ A new way for creators to collaborate with brands with full creative freedom! We're excited to continue reco... See more

🍐 Remember a few issues ago we were writing about PearPop marketplace for creators? Well, now you can participate in pretty much the same challenges and get paid directly within TikTok, as part of their TTCC program.

🛍️ It’s happening alright! TikTok is really serious about competing with Amazon. It’s already securing deals with the US warehouses to establish fulfillment for it's in-app shopping.

🎥 According to Reed Dutchshner, the CEO of Night (management company for the largest YouTubers, incl. MrBeast), short-form content might not be the smartest path to pursue if you want to create an engaged community, which ultimately all the brands want to see in the long-run.

🤑 Making money on Snapchat is pretty easy, if you are ready to expose every second of your life and post 200 Snaps a day.

📉 5-7% less Gen-Zs and Millennials are using TikTok as the search engine in 2023 in comparison to 2022.

Resources for Digital Food Creators

🍌 Is photoshop too difficult? Takes to too much time and requires a specific know-how?

*Try Canva and create amazing content in no time, that will make you look like a professional designer.

* Affiliate

Creator Spotlight

Justine Doiron

Justine has a viral presence across Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, and YouTube.

She shares plant-forward, creative recipes, connecting with 1.8 million TikTok followers as "Mother Snack."

Featured on major shows, Justine inspires joy and connections through her authentic storytelling. Residing in Brooklyn with partner Eric and food-loving French bulldog, Walter.

👉 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

🧀 How they saved the holes in Swiss cheese.

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 today’s newsletter.

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

Have a good one! 🫶