I went to university in Melbourne and somehow landed in media and comms. I joined classes in spoken word, monologues, newsrooms, media businesses…all the exciting parts. What I didn’t discover was the exciting world of PR. That one found me later, when I was offered a role doing PR and comms at a culinary school and had to go Google what PR actually was.

It was very embarrassing. I typed… what is a press release?!

So when I came across a podcast with Lulu Cheng Meservey, I was hooked in a specific way. She didn’t know this would be her space either. She’s lived in a lot of places, done comms for some of the sharpest founders working today.

But this isn’t a breakdown of Lulu. It’s me trying to answer a question I keep circling.

• How do the best brands communicate?

• How do the best founders communicate?

• And is there something in there that lets you start a movement, win trust, and beat everyone else in your category, budget or no budget?

I once interviewed a PR expert in the Philippines, someone who’s worked with genuinely great hospitality names, and he gave me his version of the job. You send a snowball down the mountain, and you pray for an avalanche. I believed that for a long time.

Here’s how it was in traditional PR

You draft a press release —> seed it to the media —> sometimes with a launch event —> send out a gift box or a trip.

Then, you hope and wait for all the publicity that comes from it.

Look, there’s still a place for it. People still read newspapers. People still watch the news.

But there is another way of thinking outside the standard press release…

Besides, most businesses can’t afford to sit at the bottom of the mountain anymore, waiting to see if the snow moves.

Instead, from Lulu, I learned this idea of GOING DIRECT.

In the last few weeks, I’ve come across two examples…

#1 When the budget is enormous

Le Monde spent six months on a six-part investigation into Bernard Arnault. They covered it all: political influence, media control, tax breaks, a succession fight. It was all very juicy.

Arnault didn’t go quiet, which is what he’s done for most of his career. He wrote a three-page letter, put it on LVMH’s X account, and thanked the journalists for their work before picking the framing apart with more sarcasm than you’d expect from a man his age.

Merci, he called it. Thank you. It was read over eight million times.

Days later he opened his own X account for the first time in his life, just to thank the people who’d shared it. Personally.

He didn’t dispute a single fact in the reporting. He just refused to let someone else’s account be the only one.

#2 When the budget is nothing

Then there’s Honestly I am, the protein bar brand. They’d landed in WHSmith and had close to no campaign budget to announce it. So they strapped a projector to a backpack and lit up walls around London.

TfL (Transport for London) asked them to take it down. By then it didn’t matter. Richard Branson commented “brilliant.” Virgin’s own account said marketing with no budget brings out the best creativity. And the founder’s note afterwards was the most honest line in the whole thing. “Well, that got slightly out of hand. The campaign became the campaign.”

One of these businesses has more money than most countries. One had a backpack. Yet both showed us that you can think outside the standard press release.

Here are other lessons I’ve taken from this podcast…

1. The product is not the hero. The best optimistic stories never lead with the thing itself; they lead with a person’s life and let the product sit in the background. Show it used in someone’s actual life. Nothing sells harder than that.

2. Fake can be spotted, and fake can’t be beautiful. Don’t buy engagement or followers. Find your own.

3. Stop using templates. I know Canva exists. I know every tool and every influencer is telling you to move faster. But a template caps you at average. You’re pulling from the same shared brain everyone else already has.

4. If you don’t give people a story, they’ll invent one. Your job is to write it first.

5. Go direct because the message dies in translation. PR person to reporter to editor to reader, it waters down a little at every hand it passes through. Going direct isn’t a growth hack. It’s how you keep the intensity of what you actually believe.

6. One more that I loved…Lulu shared an example of how she met someone at an event. They had spoken for seven minutes. For six minutes, he talked about features like the cloud kitchen concept of his business, and she distilled it to one line: “oh, you turn cooks into chefs.” And the founder ran with that line! Find ways to distil your message to a few words.

I think about this at CCA Manila all the time. When I started, there was this long-winded way of explaining culinary education. In the end, it wasn’t the team who found the one-liner. It was the people out there. Fulfil culinary dreams. That’s it in a nutshell!

So going back to my story about the snowball analogy, I don’t pray for avalanches anymore

Going direct is one of the real advantages you have right now, no matter your budget. You have pop-ups, expos, community gatherings, your own two hands and a phone camera. The ideas are infinite.

You don’t need to wait at the bottom of the mountain hoping the snow moves.

Go direct and tell your story.

Have you ever stayed in a hotel and caught yourself thinking, I could just live here? And I’m not just talking about the room. I mean, the whole bubble the place built around you.

That’s what happened to me in Kyoto.

I landed more than two months ago for my first trip, hyped up by every foodie, friend, and chef whose taste I trust. Kyoto, they said, was heaven. I booked two nights at Ace Hotel Kyoto. Then a third. Then a fourth, when the rain came in hard, and I genuinely didn’t want to leave.

Japan can feel lonely if you don’t speak the language. People are warm, but that language wall goes up fast, even when everyone’s being kind. Ace Hotel was the one place it came down.

I spent the rest of the trip trying to figure out why. It wasn’t the design, though the design is stunning. It wasn’t the location, though the location helps. It was something underneath all of it, in how the whole place talked to me. So I dug into how they built the brand and found a lesson most founders skip completely.

Treat your physical space and your people as proof, not decoration.

The building does the talking

Commune spent five years working with craftspeople across Japan, mostly in Kyoto Prefecture. You can see elements of washi, tatami, woven bamboo, ceramic tile, and wood framing. Every material has a local connection. Every collaborator became a reason the local press paid attention. You’ll see this a lot with hotels nowadays; Another example is Six Senses, which loves to spotlight that local connection.

A public hotel, not a private sanctuary

The lobby isn’t built for guests only. You’ll see a long communal table like one you would see in WeWork. It’s built as a living room for the whole neighbourhood. It has a garden courtyard, gallery, restaurants, a Stumptown Coffee counter, and a direct walk into the ShinPuhKan marketplace next door. You don’t need a room key to belong there.

On arrival, the staff handed my partner a handwritten birthday card with a bottle of wine. They’d illustrated the card themselves. They knew our names by the second day. That’s a relationship a brand chose to build out in the open. I love the squiggly, artsy effect of this, rather than something printed.

Even the little paper map they gave us at the front desk, hand-drawn staff picks for breakfast, lunch, beer, the vegan spot two blocks over, felt like a local handing me their real answer instead of a list some marketing team curated. I’ve stayed in hotels where the concierge scribbles notes onto a giant map you need two hands and a table to unfold. Ace Hotel had this ready before I even asked. It’s a small gesture, but it goes a long way.

They publish like a city desk

Ace’s own press page pulls together coverage across design, fashion, music, food, and community events. It’s not one big launch campaign, but an ongoing cultural agenda. Think how Soho House does it.

The story was never “here’s where you sleep.” It’s “here’s where things happen.” That’s a much harder position to hold, and a much stronger one.

Steal This Week

1. Name your collaborators, not just your product. Every craftsperson, farmer, or supplier behind what you make is its own story a journalist or customer can care about. Don’t bury them in an about page.

2. Let your space prove the claim instead of stating it. If you say you’re rooted in a place, show the material, the building history, and the local relationships that back it up. Anyone can say authentic. Few can show five years of research behind it.

3. Publish like it's ongoing, not a launch. One great opening week isn't a brand story. Keep a running record of people, events, and small local recommendations. I will die on this hill, but I believe today's brands need to start thinking like a media company.

And I leave you with this last nugget.

I keep thinking about that staff jacket in the lobby. The one that just said A FRIENDLY PLACE on the back. This was not tagline gymnastics. It was just the truest sentence they could write about themselves.

What’s the truest sentence you could write about your place? Hit reply; I want to know.

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I thought about it for a second.

It’s a different city than the one I left.

Michelin landed in Manila last year. Every serious kitchen suddenly has to answer a harder question.

Who are you, when the world is watching?

Here’s what stood out to me, restaurant by restaurant.

Toma Toma

A cocktail bar and restaurant tucked in Makati, built around what they call “Stories of the Philippines.”

Six years in the making, from a bartender who left Rosewood Hong Kong to build something slower.

You can taste the patience. They lean into Filipino fruits, honey, and booze.

This is an education in what we have and how good our bar products can be.

Cev x AYÀ

Cev is a ceviche-and-kinilaw shack out of Siargao, the kind of place people plan trips around. They brought a pop-up to AYÀ, Hapag’s cocktail bar in Balmori Suites, and the whole thing was playful in a way tasting menus rarely let themselves be.

The standout was a savoury taho. Taho is the soft tofu and arnibal breakfast snack every Filipino grew up shouting down from a passing vendor. Turning it savoury and putting it on a bar menu is a small act of rebellion against how sacred that memory usually gets treated.

That’s part of a bigger pattern in Manila right now. Nostalgia, but played with instead of preserved behind glass.

iaí

I didn’t get to dine here, but I heard from Jae, the owner and brand wizard. It’s a dream to see the little touches they’ve made. They personalise the menu. More on this later.

Cutie Pie

A pizza spot from the Metiz and Automat team, run by a fine dining chef who couldn’t find real pepperoni in Manila, so he made his own version out of ‘nduja instead.

It’s simple. They have five pizzas on the menu. That’s it.

They picked five and got obsessive about them instead of trying to be everything to everyone.

It’ll bring you back to college days, but with tastier pizza.

These are four completely different rooms. But every single one knew exactly what it was before it opened its doors.

I got to sit in on a talk from Jae Pickrell recently hosted by the Department of Tourism of the Philippines. She’s the other half of the team behind iaí and La Chinesca, a former magazine editor turned what she calls an F&B lackey.

She opened by telling the room she wasn’t a marketer or a branding expert.

Then she gave the clearest branding lesson I’ve heard all year.

Three circles, one inside the other

Identity is the smallest one. Think about the name, logo, and colours. That’s the part most people obsess over first.

Branding is the middle ring. Every expression of the idea. The plates, the lighting, the way the staff talks to you, the caption on the Instagram post.

Brand is the outer ring, and it’s the only one you don’t control. It’s what people say about you when you’re not in the room.

Most founders spend their whole budget on the smallest circle and hope the biggest one takes care of itself.

It doesn’t.

The never list

This stuck with me the most. Before iaí signed a lease, they had a deck with the concept, inspiration, materials, and the whole point of the place laid out for architects and contractors before a single wall went up.

And in that deck was a list of things the restaurant would never do.

It wasn’t a mood board of what it wanted to be. It was a hard boundary of what it refused to become.

That’s rarer than people think. Most brands know what they’re chasing. Few know what they’d walk away from.

Touch is part of that boundary too. Every material in that room, the wood, the weave at the entrance, was a decision, not a default.

Five questions

She left the room with five, and I’ve been turning them over since.

1. What is true about us?

2. What would we never do?

3. What can guests touch that proves who we are?

4. Is it the same on our best day and our worst?

5. What’s the one sentence we want retold?

That last one is the whole game, isn’t it? Word of mouth isn’t luck. Someone has to be handed a sentence worth repeating.

Manila’s dining scene right now is full of people who did the groundwork before they signed the lease. They knew the never list before they knew the menu.

What changed wasn’t the food. It was the clarity behind it.

What’s the one sentence you want your guests retelling about you?

Next week, I’m back to studying brands.

See you,

Bea

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My ideal date is Nando’s. Date with a lover, date with myself, date with friends, doesn’t matter, it works for all three.

Fight me on this, but nothing is as comforting as a plate of peri-peri chicken and chips. I’ve got years of memories stacked up in that restaurant. My love for it started in college. But I know I am not alone in this.

I’ve wondered for a while why a chicken chain gets this kind of love instead of just customers, so let’s break it down.

How it started

It was all because of two guys with no restaurant experience but a very good appetite. Fernando Duarte took his friend Robert Brozin for lunch at a Portuguese-Mozambican takeaway called Chickenland in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, back in 1987. They liked the chicken enough to buy the place for around 80,000 rand, about £25k, borrowed from friends and family. They renamed it after Duarte’s son.

What actually let it scale was the Enthoven family. Through their investment firm Yellowwoods, they supplied the patient capital that turned one South African eatery into a global chain, and Dick Enthoven’s family still owns the business today. Money willing to wait is a bigger part of this story than most people give it credit for.

Then there’s the part I still can’t fully explain. The black card, free chicken for life, allegedly, if you’re the right kind of famous. Nando’s has never confirmed it exists and never denied it either. They just let the myth run.

Lots of other famous people rave about Nando’s. Obama gave the Cape Town branch a shoutout in a speech to students. Prince William told Brozin directly he’d become a fan, off the back of his protection officer’s recommendation. Ed Sheeran is one of the names most tied to actually holding the black card. None of that is something you can buy. You can only build a place people want to talk about on their own.

Here’s what I think actually makes Nando’s special, beyond the chicken:

No two Nando’s look the same

Most chains standardise because it’s cheaper to franchise that way. Nando’s let every branch have its own personality and filled the walls with commissioned South African art instead of the generic prints everyone else hangs. Walking in doesn’t feel like walking into a franchise. It feels like walking into someone’s actual taste.

I personally go to the Clink Street location. There are high ceilings, chandeleirs and art everywhere!

A napkin is an opportunity to speak directly to your customer!

Whoever created Nando’s tone of voice is a genius. You see it everywhere from the menu to the napkin. All of it traces back to one early decision, made when Nando’s had three stores and no money to speak of: the founders told their first ad agency they wanted the brand to be irreverent. Not funny for the sake of funny. Irreverent as an actual instruction. That line, given that early, is why the humour still lands decades later instead of feeling like a bit that got old.

They are responsive to the world around them!

The marketing landscape has changed a lot now. But back then, commercials were a big deal. And Nando’s knew how to make a statement. It reminded me a lot of Apple’s first few commercials. Nando’s let the conversation happen in public instead of hiding behind a statement. Just check out some of their ads shared in this lecture!

Crazies, creatives, purpose

Underneath all of it is the same engine, running on repeat. Find the people with genuinely fresh eyes and give them the room.

Give the creatives real permission, early, before there’s budget to justify it. Then let the crazies happen, the jokes, the stunts, the ads that shouldn’t work on paper, because that’s what people with real permission actually make.

The purpose part has always been within the founders. They wanted to create a value-based business. Today, Brozin isn’t really involved in the day-to-day anymore. Yet, he’s putting that same energy into Jozi My Jozi, trying to rebuild confidence in Johannesburg block by block. This interview below gives you a glimpse of why Nando’s is the way it is.

None of these elements above work alone. A weird store with boring copy is just a weird store. Great copy with a slow response time just looks like someone in marketing had a good week once. It’s doing all of it at once, consistently, for almost forty years; that makes people feel like Nando’s is a friend instead of a food chain. You don’t get invited to someone’s first date, their solo dinner, and their group hangout unless you’ve earned a personality people actually trust.

Brozin jokes that, “it took fifteen years to become an overnight success.”

Steal this week

1. Walk through your own store, site, or packaging and ask if it reflects an actual point of view or if it’s just safe and easy to replicate. Pick one place to let personality back in.

2. Write yourself the one-line brief Nando’s gave their first agency. Not “make it good.” Something with a spine.

3. Find the next moment in your world worth reacting to, a win, a loss, a piece of news your people are already talking about, and say something in your own voice before it’s safe to.

What’s the equivalent of a Nando’s napkin in your business, the tiny thing nobody’s paying attention to that could be saying something funny or true instead of nothing at all? Reply and tell me what you’d put on it.

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Gary Vaynerchuk built his name telling businesses to chase attention online. Last month, he posted a video called “The Rise of Analogue Is Here.” When the man who wrote Day Trading Attention starts pointing at the physical world, it’s worth asking why.

Part of it is the obvious. Everyone can post, the feed is free to enter, and attention there gets cheaper every month. The deeper point he keeps making is the one that should stop you. Within a few years, he reckons, most people won’t be able to tell whether the video in front of them is real. When a product shot, a founder’s face, and a whole origin story can all be generated, the feed stops being proof of anything.

A room is still proof. You were there. The chef was there. It happened in front of people who can’t be rendered. That’s what the internet is losing, and the physical still owns, and it’s the exact thing every brand is short on right now: a reason to be believed. Virality creates moments. Strategy creates memory. A sold-out night is both.

Food and drink have a head start, because our whole medium is already physical. And the sharpest version of it right now is the pop-up.

I wanted to hear this from someone who does it for a living, so I spoke to Joy Chopra. She runs Expand with Joy. Her whole business is taking chefs and mixologists into cities they don’t operate in, for one or two nights, and building the moment around them. She sources talent off the Michelin and World’s 50 Best lists, cold-DMs them on Instagram, and matches each one to a venue and a city where the story will land. Every answer she gave me pointed back to the same thing.

How did Expand with Joy start?
I wanted to help chefs and mixologists increase their international exposure, whether that meant opening somewhere new or just doing a pop-up. Pop-ups turned out to be the easier path, so that became the speciality. I started with one of India’s most acclaimed restaurants, and the owner suggested a pop-up when a second location didn’t make sense. I honestly didn’t even know what a pop-up was at the time. He became a real mentor. The “expand” comes from that. It’s about helping people expand their exposure.

Why does a brand actually do a pop-up? What’s the point of one or two nights?
Branding, marketing, and prestige. A chef is flying in, a prestigious venue is hosting them, and they’re only in town for a night or two. You don’t know when they’ll be back or if you’ll ever make it to their home restaurant. That creates a hard-to-get feeling, and that’s the point. It works for the talent too. For bars, doing takeovers is part of how you climb the World’s 50 Best list.

What’s the one that stuck with you?
Takuma Watanabe of Martiny’s in New York. We did two nights in Toronto, at the Deauville Club inside the Reverie Hotel. Night one was Martiny’s; night two was his sister's bar, L’Americana. A lot of gin, a lot of Negronis, which happen to be my favourite. Two nights only, and then it was gone.

Tell me about one that flopped.
A recent one. Great cocktails, a beautiful menu, and maybe twenty people. I was disappointed. Looking back, we leaned on the bar’s email list and regulars and never reached past them. The press I invited didn’t come through, and it landed on a Tuesday. You have to reach the people who don’t already come to you.

Where is pop-up culture heading?
Asia, right now. I planned a Southeast Asia tour for a client, nine to eleven cities this year, and the appetite is huge. Brands sponsor a lot of it, sometimes down to the hotel and visa costs, so no one’s paying out of pocket. I was in Singapore recently and everywhere you went there was a pop-up happening that night or about to. You can feel the energy.

Steal this week

Joy ungatekept her system, so here it is, aimed at anyone building something in the real world for a brand.

• Keep a master list. Everyone you’ve met, the venue, the city, and detailed notes on what each person actually cares about. That list is your follow-up engine, and follow-up is where most of this gets won. If a night doesn’t happen this year, the notes are how you make it happen next year.

• Reach past your own people. Marketing to your email list and your regulars only touches the people already coming. Joy’s flops came from stopping there. Go find the ones who have never walked in.

• Give it a month, minimum. She books promotion at least a month out. A great night with a late invite is still an empty room.

• Bring press in early. Journalists who get asked the week of don’t show. Joy learned that one on the night only twenty people came.

• Pick the day on purpose.

• Follow up past the first no. She lands World’s 50 Best talent through cold Instagram DMs by staying persistent and reading silence as “not yet.” Persistence is a skill here. Treat it like one.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a correction. The more synthetic the feed gets, the more valuable a real place is. US vinyl passed a billion dollars last year, its first time since 1983 and its nineteenth straight year of growth. Gen Alpha is buying flip phones. People are paying to give up their phones on holiday. The brands I keep coming back to are the ones giving people a reason to show up in person.

What I’ve been loving lately

1. SULT ran its first creator trip with the phones locked away. They handed everyone a Brick to block their apps, disposable cameras instead of iPhones, and let the weekend happen in the room. A hydration brand found that content gets better when nobody is busy making it.

2. Citizens of Soil built an olive oil bar. A real pop-up in Notting Hill where you can taste flights of extra-virgin olive oil like wine, olive oil soft serve, and all. They took something that lives on a supermarket shelf and gave people a reason to stand in a room and try it.

When did you last make something people had to show up for? Hit reply and tell me the last real-world moment your brand made, or the one you keep meaning to make. I’ll read every one.

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Kathryn Turner joined Marks and Spencer in 1995. Thirty years later, she’s on your phone, reminding you of the first product she ever created for M&S: a slice of Teletubby toast.

She isn’t a creator. She’s the Director of Product Development, and she knows the range better than anyone M&S could pay to talk about it. Behind her is a small team whose whole job is to work out what people will want to eat next and get it onto shelves before anyone else does. For three decades, you never saw those people. The brand did the talking, and they stayed backstage. Now one of them has a phone, and a two-minute Foodhall walk pulls more attention than most of what the marketing budget buys.

@kathrynlturner @kathrynlturner ♬ original sound - Kathryn Turner

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Founders get sold two ways to grow. Chase UGC, where customers post about you. Or put your own face on everything until you basically are the brand. Almost everyone walks straight past the third door, which is for the people already on the payroll.

Quick distinction: UGC (user-generated content) is your customers vouching for you. EGC (employee-generated content) is your team explaining you. One is proof you’re worth buying. The other is how the brand grows beyond you without becoming a faceless account. People trust the person who actually makes the thing. A product developer telling you why a recipe works just lands in a way a brand caption never will. You believe her.

PerfectTed didn’t do it with a bigger ad budget

In an interview with Will Poskett, PerfectTed’s Head of Marketing Kelly Shaw walked through the numbers. In early 2023, they were doing around £10k a month. Two years later, they were at a £50m annualised run rate. She credits the early growth to the founders and product-market fit, not a performance budget.

Then look at how they actually show up. Up to 30 employees post on LinkedIn every day, as themselves, never from the brand account. Kelly calls it H2H, human to human. People bond with people, not with a logo, so they put real staff front and centre instead of polishing a corporate feed.

And they make it fun. Every week there’s a LinkedIn of the Week ceremony, confetti cannon, a giant novelty cheque, and a handshake from the founders for whoever’s post did best. Posting stops being a chore and becomes something people actually want to win.

Here’s the part I’d sit with. A competitor can copy your ad by Friday. They can’t copy 30 people who like working for you enough to post about it.

The how: two levers

Alex Lieberman built Morning Brew and now runs Tenex. He boils the EGC playbook down to two moves: take away the friction, and give people a reason to bother.

Friction first. Make it so a post takes 15 minutes, not two hours. A prompt, a format, somewhere to put it. If it feels like a project, nobody does it twice, and your best people opt out.

Then the reason to bother, and this is where most companies get it wrong. They reward reach, so the person with the biggest following always wins, and everyone else stops trying. Lieberman scores participation instead, so the person with 200 followers can beat the person with 8,000. Read the entire tweet below!

Steal this week:

• Start with the two or three people who light up talking about the craft, not the whole team.

• Build the 15-minute path so posting never becomes a second job.

• Score participation, not follower counts. The smallest account should be able to win.

• Protect the voice. If it doesn’t sound like them, it doesn’t go out.

• Make it a ritual with a bit of status attached, not a task you hand down.

I even heard of a company that pays for acting classes for their staff so they get more comfortable on camera. I kind of love that.

Kathryn Turner didn’t go viral because Teletubby toast is nostalgic. She went viral because she genuinely knows it. She’s the one who could actually bring it back, and you can feel that watching her.

M&S has a big marketing team, and still the clip that travelled was one woman who’s spent thirty years deciding what goes on the shelf.

So before you brief another agency, or point the camera at yourself again, have a look around the room. Who on your team already talks about your product better than your marketing does?

PS. Just check out the numbers on Kathryn’s videos!

Last summer someone on Amelia Christie-Miller’s team clocked a heatwave in the forecast and posted a recipe reel they’d already filmed. There was no brief or budget. Nobody upstairs signed it off.

It got 154,574 views and 4,892 saves. Nearly 90% of viewers had never followed the account.

The easy read is that they got lucky, that a reel caught a wave.

The truer read is that somebody was listening. She saw the weather, remembered a video sitting in the archive, and put the two together before the heat even landed. That is not a content skill. It is an attention skill, and it is the thing Bold Bean is best at.

I’ve been trying to name what they actually do, because “they’re good at social” doesn’t cover it. The closest I’ve got is this: Bold Bean listens in three rooms. Most brands only stand in one.

Room one is the founder.

Amelia writes about herself in a way most founders won’t. She covers: imposter syndrome, the gaps in what she knows, the stretch of not sleeping on mat leave and the days the job felt too big for her.

She doesn’t post it to look brave. She posts it because the honest version is the one people lean toward. Her own read is that the more openly she’s named her struggles, the more her team has stepped up around her.

Listening here means listening to yourself first, not the polished founder you think buyers want.

Try this: if you never know what to share online or on a stage, go back through your meeting notes and your Slack. Amelia once said she’s nosy about what her team is doing. For those who feel like they have nothing to share, don’t overthink it. The content is already sitting there in what everyone around you is building. You just have to catch it.

Room two is the people around the brand.

Customers, community, and the people she chooses to work with.

When they built the cookbook, Full of Beans, they didn’t run a submission form and call it community. They invited their Bean Champs to put family recipes in a book alongside the founder’s own. What came back was Raina Patel’s black bean makhani, perfected over years, sent in with pride.

The collaborations run on the same instinct. The Ottolenghi jar sits on the Waitrose shelf with both names on it, not Ottolenghi’s alone with Bold Bean filling the tin behind the label. Holding your ground on whose name goes on the front is its own kind of listening, to what your brand is worth.

Try this: pick one customer or collaborator this week and actually ask what they think, then use their words, not yours. The way your people describe you is usually sharper than the way you describe yourself.

Room three is the room everyone’s already in.

The heatwave lives here.

Most brands treat social like a stage they perform on. Bold Bean treats it like a room they happen to be standing in, hearing what everyone’s talking about that day, then saying something useful about it. The weather was the conversation. They joined it.

And the money behind this isn’t soft. Their paid media that same month ran at a 572% return, roughly three times what most brands would be thrilled with.

Try this: keep a running note of what your audience is already talking about this week, the weather, a holiday, a news moment, a shared complaint. Match one thing you’ve already made to one of those. You don’t need new content. You need better timing.

Here’s where most F&B brands get it backwards.

They pour everything into room three, posting more, posting louder. They give room two some attention when a customer complains. And in room one, the founder saying something true is skipped almost entirely because it feels indulgent or risky.

Then they wonder why the content tests fine and still lands flat.

You cannot broadcast your way to trust. Bold Bean didn’t grow because they talk well. They grew because they listened in all three rooms, and only then did they open their mouths.

Virality gave them the heatwave moment.

The listening is what makes the next one repeatable.

So before your next post, one honest question. Which of the three rooms are you actually spending time in, and which one have you been avoiding because it’s the hardest to sit in? Hit reply, I read every one.

If you need proof of how intently this brand listens to its surroundings, I leave you with these moments…

They sent a Bold Bean package to one of their 90-year-old bean-obsessed customers. Read it here.

Amelia, the founder, wrote about her maternity leave and how her business thrived

When they shared this hen-do outfit…

They sent an applicant beans as a thank you when she didn’t get the role.

How they treat people in interviews says a lot about the brilliance behind this brand.

I got my slot at the Kewpie Museum in Tokyo yesterday. You have to book ahead, because there’s a waitlist to get into a building about mayonnaise, and that tells you something before you’ve even walked in. I spent the morning in a room built around one condiment, and most of it had me thinking about how badly founders read this brand.

People look at Kewpie and see the mascot, the squeeze bottle, the drizzle that looks good on camera, and the salmon rice bowls all over TikTok. They decide the lesson is to get an icon, catch a moment, and win. But that’s the wrapping, and the wrapping was never the thing that made Kewpie last a hundred years.

The real story starts with a bet. Toichiro Nakashima tried mayonnaise on a work trip to the US and the UK (he was an overseas intern for Japan's Department of Agriculture and Commerce!), then came home to a Tokyo rebuilding itself after the 1923 earthquake. He watched the city put itself back together in Western clothes and figured the food would follow the fashion. So in 1925, he launched Japan’s first mayonnaise into a country where most people had never seen it, and a few of them genuinely thought it was hair oil.

What I love is how he sold it. He didn’t pitch a condiment. He pitched a mission, to “help improve the physiques and health of Japanese people,” which is a wild thing to claim about mayonnaise. He gave people a reason to care before he handed them a jar.

Then he spent the next hundred years doing the part nobody wants to do.

Most founders think their problem is that people don’t know them yet. Usually, the real problem is that people don’t know what to do with them. Kewpie worked that out early and never stopped answering it. In 1962, they made a TV show called Kewpie 3-Minute Cooking, and the whole idea was that cooking tips should turn up every day like a weather forecast. They weren’t shouting at anyone to buy mayo. They were solving dinner, over and over, until you couldn’t think about the meal without thinking about them.

That show has been running for sixty years. Walk through the museum and the same instinct is everywhere, from a kitchen looping quick recipes to a cafe putting mayo in dishes you’d never try at home to shelves of it sorted by use and by country. Everything answers the question Nakashima started with. What do I make with this tonight?

The teaching is the product, and the mayo almost comes second.

This is where I’d argue with the advice everyone gives: to find your one unique difference. Kewpie has a real one. It’s made with only egg yolks, about four to a bottle, which is why it’s that deep yellow and tastes like more than air. And that difference still isn’t why it won.

Loads of products have a genuine difference and die on the shelf anyway, because a difference gets you bought once but it doesn’t get you into someone’s Tuesday. Kewpie got into Tuesday by taking the long road every time the short one was easier. When they switched from glass to cheaper plastic bottles in 1958, they didn’t keep the savings, they dropped the price so more homes would try it. After the war, when good ingredients were scarce and competitors were restarting on whatever the black market sold, Nakashima held off and waited years for materials he’d actually put his name on. None of it was exciting, and all of it added up.

So here’s what you can take from a Mayo museum if you want what you’re building to still be standing in ten years.

Sell the habit, not the jar. Nakashima didn’t sell “buy mayo,” he sold “eat better.” Work out the change you want to make in someone’s day, then let the product be how they get there. People forget a jar, but they don’t forget a habit you helped them keep.

Make usage your whole content strategy. Kewpie has been answering the question “What do I cook tonight?” on television since 1962. Stop telling people how good you are and start showing them what to make, because every recipe and demo drops the cost of “I don’t know what I’d do with this” down to nothing. If your customer can’t picture using you by tomorrow morning, closing that gap is the work to do.

Build for decades, not for the campaign. Think about the plastic bottle, the years he waited, a cooking show that’s still on air, a museum people line up for. None of it spikes, but it builds, and the part of your brand that’s a grind to keep doing is usually the exact part no competitor will copy.

I keep coming back to that booked slot. A factory put mayonnaise behind a reservation, and people line up for it, and not because of the mascot. They line up because Kewpie spent a hundred years teaching a whole country what to do with a jar, then made watching them do it feel worth a ticket.

You see it at the end of the tour. The gift shop had kids, grandmothers, parents and teenagers all queuing for Kewpie merch, the little bottles, the doll keychains. That’s not a customer base. That’s a fandom, and it runs across generations.

So tell me, and please reply, because I read it all. If I handed your customer your product right now, with no caption and no founder story attached, would they know what to do with it by tomorrow? Kewpie spent a century making sure the answer was yes. Where does that leave yours?

Last week I spent almost a week in a pop-up city, in Healdsburg, California.

A few hundred people move into one place for a few weeks to build, research, and learn together. Think college, except the classes are taught by whoever you sat next to at dinner (There were classes about why you should build UFO tech or the case for living on the moon), and between sessions, there are cold plunges, saunas, and strangers arguing about robotics.

I asked one woman over dinner why she came. She wanted to see how other people lived, like nomads. A guy from New York said his friends were stuck thinking one way and he wanted different perspectives. Others were there to build the automation companies of 2035.

I came for one track, storytelling.

What hit me like a 10-minute cold plunge is that storytelling isn’t an art or a science. It’s a boring routine that pays.

I sat through three sessions learning manifesto writing, distribution and growing an audience from zero. On the schedule, they appeared to be three separate topics. By the end, they were one thing, and most people run it in the wrong order.

Most founders start with tactics. They think of hooks, posting schedules, or the algorithm. They bolt a “brand voice” on later, if ever. They never write the manifesto. That’s why so much founder content is technically fine and completely forgettable.

The order that works runs the other way. Manifesto first. Then, reps. Then, tactics. Then, back to a sharper manifesto.

First, write the manifesto.

Manifesto 101 was run by Ida Josefiina, who writes the substack, She brings a Hollywood approach to storytelling into companies. One of her essays is called “Why the fuck do you exist?” That’s the energy.

Her argument: most people build a brand defensively. They conduct market research, competitor analysis, and positioning against competitors. This is the wrong starting point. Find your core truth first and let the narrative follow.

A manifesto does four things. It aligns with what you believe. It speaks straight to your audience. It names the enemy. And it calls in your people while pushing everyone else away.

Her example was Playboy’s first issue in 1953. Hefner wrote that it wasn’t a “family magazine,” and that if a wife or mother-in-law had picked it up by mistake, she should pass it to the man in her life.

He didn’t even date the cover, in case there was never a second issue.

One paragraph and you knew exactly who it was for, and who it wasn’t.

The question she left us with: if everyone in the world were listening, what would you say?

Second, do the reps.

Session two was Ashe (@ashebytes on X) on building distribution and getting past your visibility wounds. Most people don’t have a content problem; they have a being-seen problem. The fear that posting makes you cringe, or too much, or not enough.

Her fix is unglamorous. Post like training. Three to five times a day until it bores you. Until there’s no charge left in hitting publish. Your first 20 or 30 posts will probably flop. That’s the warm-up set, not failure.

Some notes:

• Don’t pick a niche up front. Make the content you’d actually send a friend. The niche shows up in whatever gets traction.

• Work on one thing at a time. Hooks first. Then scripts. Then editing.

• Hide your metrics. There’s a Chrome extension that blanks your likes and impressions. Post, close the laptop. You get desensitised by reps, not by mindset.

• Create more than you consume.

Ashe used X to network her way into her own industry. She turned her metrics off completely, made a feed she’d doomscroll herself, then pitched herself for the things she actually wanted. She pitched Rick Rubin when he was looking for an AI expert to spend time with him. The principle she leaned on: if you like it, it’s good enough.

On the relationship side:

• Pick 30 accounts you actually like. Reply for real. Build the relationship before you need anything from it.

• The real metric isn’t followers. It’s whether your network picks up when you call. Do people reply? Do deals close? Followers are a lagging indicator.

Third, think of the tactics.

Session three featured Jake of Jake Explains on growing from zero to 150K in a year. Jake’s a teacher who started making explainer videos because he wanted to make something. He didn’t set out to build a brand. Creating led somewhere.

He reframed the algorithm in one move. Stop saying the algorithm hates you. Say the audience didn’t like that video. The algorithm is just the audience.

On hooks, the most important three seconds you’ll make:

• A hook has to stun first, then make someone curious.

• It has three parts: the text on screen, what’s being shown and what you’re saying.

• People read images faster than words, so lead with a strong visual and strong text in the first three seconds.

On refining:

• Results are lopsided. One or two posts out of twenty drive most of the return. When one hits, run it again.

• Use AI to draft and speed things up, not to replace the part that only you can say.

Manifesto, reps, tactics, sharper manifesto, more reps. You don’t run it once. Your manifesto gets clearer the more you post. Better tactics follow once you actually know your audience. And the audience grows as your truth sharpens.

The part that stays with me is the human side of storytelling. Ida turned a point of view into work with companies. Ashe is not afraid to pitch herself to people,e like Rick Rubin. Jake went from teaching to a body of work that people pay attention to. None of them set out to build a personal brand. They made things, meaningfully and often, and the things opened doors. That’s the payoff hiding inside the boring routine.

I didn’t need the framework to recognise it. I’d already experienced in just over a year of sharing more online.

A year ago, I was consulting across every industry that would have me, and burning out from the context switching. I bet on one space: food. I wanted to see if focus would do what range never did.

For the first three months, there was no sign. A few likes, which I already knew were worthless.

March - I got talking to the first person whose work lined up with mine. My first real client, the first project that felt like it meant something. That’s also when I noticed my scoreboard was odd. I wasn’t counting likes. I was counting business conversations, event invites, interesting people, and new friends in the industry. Those were the signals that mattered to me.

Then I got busy, and inconsistency crept in.

June - I stopped dabbling and built a system. Batch the writing, batch the recording. Some people prefer day to day. Find your own rhythm. I also stopped doing all the admin myself so I could keep showing up.

After a few months, it compounded. October and November, I stopped waiting to be found and reached out first. Leads came in instead of me chasing them. Things came up. I locked in several credible opportunities. I started working with a food podcast I’d wanted to work with for years. And I met like-minded people online.

May to now - I’m playing with digital products, testing whether any of this can scale.

All because I kept putting myself out there. That’s the loop.

I’m not afraid to experiment every quarter. Right now, it’s a pantry series, pulling apart the brands I can’t stop thinking about.

Steal this week

• Write one sentence naming who your brand is for and who it absolutely isn’t. That’s the seed of your manifesto.

• Post five times this week and don’t check a single metric until Sunday. Then ask one friend whose taste you trust: Do you actually find this interesting?

• Take one moment from your business this week and tell it as a story, not an update. Hook, then the turn, then what it meant.

P.S. I’m in Japan for two weeks. Which Japanese food or drink brand should I study? Send me your favourite brands.

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Share 👄 What's On Your Plate

First night in the US and a box of David bars turns up in the breakfast buffet. Gold wrapper, named after the Michelangelo sculpture. It makes every other bar in the grocery aisle look like it’s shouting.

I’m spending the week around the exact people it’s built for: founders, tech, optimisers. Peter Rahal, its founder, intended it to be in that crowd. He said, “Give more product away.” But caveat here..give it to the right people.

The gold packaging is not the part worth stealing, though. The part worth stealing is one rule the founder repeats until it’s annoying.

What is obvious gets killed.

Peter Rahal built RX Bar (a bar built for the Paleo and CrossFit crowd), sold it to Kellogg for $600 million, and now runs David at a $725 million valuation in well under two years. His whole philosophy fits in that line. If an idea is obvious, it moves nothing. It has to be strange enough to make you stop and true enough to survive the second look.

He’s blunt about what the obvious looks like: David and Goliath, a golden ticket, a room full of guys called David. Those are the first three ideas in any brainstorm. Also, the first three are AI hands you. Cross them out.

So what does not-obvious look like?

It looks like a billboard of plain boiled cod.

David’s site ranks foods by protein per calorie. Cod comes first. David comes second. Most brands would bury that. David put their gold bar on a billboard next to a slab of boiled fish, because cod is the one thing that beats them on their own metric.

It’s confusing, a little outrageous and completely true. You stop because it makes no sense, then you stay because it does. And they didn’t only spoof it. They partnered with an Alaskan fishery and actually sold the cod.

No survey gets you there. No focus group asks for cod. That only comes from imagination, and from being willing to look insane in the service of something true.

Years ago, I sat in a workshop with Ruth Reichl in Melbourne. She made us describe a snowflake without using any of the obvious words, and filled a whiteboard with everything we’d normally reach for first, so we could cross it all out and go somewhere, stranger. I think about that constantly with brands. Your first idea is the whiteboard. The work starts after you cross it out.

He’s done it before, too. RX Bar shrank its own logo until you could barely find it and put the ingredients on the front instead. Every marketer told him it was a mistake. That mistake is the thing people recognise on sight now.

There’s a cost nobody mentions. Maybe one in ten of these lands. Not-obvious means not-safe. People reach for David and Goliath because it can’t embarrass them. It also can’t do anything.

David ships one of these about once a quarter, and tears up the script every time. You can’t repeat the trick, because a repeated surprise is just an expectation.

Here’s one recent example for the launch of their protein ice cream. Bella Hadid was seen eating out of a rare tub of David’s protein ice cream in a typical paparazzi yacht photo. Was it a coincidence? Or was it planted? Either way, it’s a genius move thats created demand.

One contrast worth keeping. Recently, David’s 150-calorie claim got pulled into a lawsuit, and the internet turned it into a Mean Girls bit, Regina George and all. That blew up on its own. What did Peter do? He put out a statement, then jumped on a Substack chat, Feed Me, for an emergency press conference, taking reader questions head-on. The lawsuit was the moment. Going direct was the move.

Most of us in food reach for the obvious idea because it feels responsible. It photographs fine, and nobody gets fired. It sinks without a ripple while we wonder why the launch felt flat.

Steal this week

• Write your obvious list, then kill the top one. Whatever came to you first came to everyone. Treat the first three as a warm-up, not the plan.

• Find your cod. The one thing that genuinely beats you on a real number. Stand next to it instead of hiding from it. The honest comparison is always more interesting than the flattering one.

• Lead with the specific, not the summary. Three egg whites beat “12g of protein.” Name the actual thing on the front. Specific is what people keep. Tidy is what they scroll past.

I'll leave you with the video. David launched a product like it was the iPhone, Steve Jobs’ cadence and all. Watch it, then go be braver. Be a little more insane.

What’s the most obvious idea sitting on your plan right now? Reply and tell me.

I’ll tell you what I’d do instead.

I asked the universe for a sign on which brand to write about first. It handed me one on the pavement. A single-serve sachet of Tabasco.

I knew what it was before I was close enough to read a word.

This is one of America’s most recognised brands. People get it tattooed on them. It’s gone up to space with astronauts. There’s a collab with Absolut vodka and Sephora.

All of that for a bottle with three ingredients, made on Avery Island, Louisiana. The recipe has barely changed since 1868. Now it’s sold in nearly 200 countries.

A brand that is loud, built on something that is still.

Tabasco was never chasing the fifteen seconds of fame. Everything we are told about growing a food or drink brand says to post more, chase the trend, refresh the packaging, and be everywhere. Tabasco did almost none of that. It built something sturdier. It built a cult.

The person who taught me to see it this way is Lulu Cheng Meservey. She sits on Shopify’s board and previously ran communications at Substack. One theory she talks about is that the best companies are built like cults — not the creepy kind, but the kind people follow, defend, and never leave.

Seen through that lens, Tabasco’s 150-year run is the perfect example of that. How can you make your brand so embedded in culture that people would get tatoos of it?!

There are three levels to this, according to Lulu. Here is what you can steal from each.

Level 1: the leader has to speak

In a cult, the leader speaks directly. With conviction and real skin in the game. You would never build a cult and then keep the leader off stage in case they say something off-script.

Edmund McIlhenny believed in those peppers. He grew the first crop in 1868 and shipped the first 600-plus bottles himself. But Edmund died well over a century ago, and the voice never went quiet. It moved on to the family who kept building the company for generations, and then to the team.

Watch how Tabasco actually shows up online and in the media, and you will see it. They put their own staff on camera, from the food scientist, the barrel makers, the agriculture team. Those people are what Lulu calls the “mascots of the cult”.

Here is the part that proves the system. This year, for the first time in over 150 years, the family handed the CEO job to an outsider. Adam Graves, a Nestlé veteran who used to run the division behind DiGiorno and Hot Pockets. And the first thing they did was put him through the Tabasco production process. He spent his early weeks working at the cooperage and the bottling line, then wrote about it publicly. That is the cult initiating its new leader before he earns the right to speak for it.

Level 2: give them something to believe, then repeat it forever

Trust is engineered, not stumbled into. It is built on three things: repeated exposure, shared values, and conviction. Tabasco runs on all three, and it does it by barely changing.

Its stated values are almost aggressively simple: make it better, make it last (You’ll see this in their headquarters). With three ingredients, one diamond label and a pepper mash aged up to three years in white oak barrels. It’s like a magic potion!

That sameness is not laziness. It is the strategy. Every identical bottle is repeated exposure, one more reason you stop treating it as a stranger.

The three-year aging is the values made physical. “We age our peppers for three years” is a belief dressed up as a process, and it tells you exactly who they are without a single adjective.

Most founders think consistency is boring, so they keep reinventing. But virality creates moments, and strategy creates memory. Tabasco chose strategy/memory. It picked what it believed, held the line for 150 years, and never once flinched, until the whole world could recognise this little bottle.

Level 3: build it so the cult recruits itself

The last point is the one that founders need to hear most. Recruiting the first believers is the hardest thing you will ever do. After that, if you have built it right, the cult recruits itself.

Tabasco’s first batch was 658 bottles, shipped to grocers around the Gulf Coast. Slow, hard, one shopkeeper at a time. After that, other people spread it.

Three of my favourite examples:

• The Bloody Mary - A bartender named Fernand Petiot, working the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis in New York in 1934, found the original vodka-and-tomato mix too bland for his customers. So he started reaching for Tabasco. That spicier version is essentially the Bloody Mary we drink today. (The drink’s full origin is argued over, but the Tabasco fingerprint is not.) Tabasco did not run a campaign. Someone picked up the bottle and invented a category.

• The Charlie Ration Cookbook - In 1966, a McIlhenny who had eaten miserable rations in WWII wrapped a tiny bottle of Tabasco, a can opener, and a pocket cookbook of foxhole recipes, and slipped it into soldiers’ kit in Vietnam. Distribution as devotion. They did not buy ad space. They solved a genuinely sad problem, bad food in hard places, for people who would carry the bottle and the loyalty home.

• The collabs - This year Absolut launched a spicy Tabasco vodka across more than 50 markets. Sephora did a Tabasco lip gloss, the brand’s first move into beauty. When other cults want to borrow your symbol, it is a sign that yours is real.

The pattern underneath all three: Tabasco keeps handing people a reason to use it in their own world, then gets out of the way. “Flavour your world” is not a tagline; it is an instruction. Use me however you like. The users become the marketing department, and they do it for free, with more credibility than any ad.

Why this matters right now

AI can flood every feed with hot-sauce content by lunchtime. It can write the captions, cut the reels, and spin up a hundred lookalike brands before dinner.

What it cannot do is be Edmund McIlhenny. Or the barrel maker on Avery Island. Or the bartender who reached for the bottle in 1934. The flood of sameness is exactly why a real, human-anchored story is worth more now, not less.

Tabasco is not timeless because it went viral. It is timeless because it lets one story keep compounding.

Steal this week

Three moves you can make by next Monday:

1. Put a human with skin in the game on camera - You, or the person who actually makes the product. Let them say what they believe and in their own words. Conviction beats production value.

2. Name your three-year barrel - Find the one thing in how you make your product that proves what you believe, and turn it into a sentence you can repeat forever. Then repeat it until you are sick of it. That is roughly when your audience is just starting to remember it.

3. Write the instruction, not the ad. Stop telling people how good your product is. Hand them a specific new way to use it in their own life, and let them take the credit. “Flavour your world” is a permission slip. Write yours.

Two years ago, I met Danny Yip, the owner of The Chairman, at Hong Kong’s Wine and Dine Festival. He’s one of the most generous hospitality champions I’ve ever come across - the kind of person who pours you a cup of pu-erh tea and then disappears with you into a three-hour conversation about it.

A year later, he let me bring my parents to The Chairman, currently the best restaurant in Asia. We sat down at the table, and a bottle of champagne arrived without us ordering it. A gift, for us.

I’ve thought about that small gesture more than I’ve thought about the actual meal. Someone in that room, in the middle of a service running at a level most restaurants can’t even imagine, decided that this act of care was worth doing. And it almost certainly happened because of Danny, because the way a leader treats hospitality trickles into every corner of how a restaurant runs.

That, to me, is the whole story of where food and drink are going. The fermented lemons aged for two decades. The staff who’ve been there long enough to understand what hospitality really means. The pu-erh tea poured for a stranger. The champagne sent without ceremony.

Care in the food.

Care in the service.

Care in the way the story gets told.

That’s the new superpower of this category. And I think it’s the most exciting thing happening on the planet right now.

I’m betting my career on it. Here’s why.

I’ve spent the last fifteen years working in and around food, which is a sentence that took me a long time to say out loud.

I trained in media and advertising. I owned a tequila bar in Melbourne. I worked inside a restaurant group. And I currently work on the brand and communications of the culinary school my mother and grandmother founded almost thirty years ago — the first one in the Philippines, and the place where I started giving prospective student tours when I was ten.

Back then, when I asked those students what they wanted to be, the answer was almost always the same word. Chef. That was the dream. That was the only dream on offer.

Today, I work with food and beverage founders on brand and storytelling, and when I ask the same question, the answers have multiplied:

Content creator/ Fermenter/ Product builder/ Farmer/ Importer/ Supper club host/ R&D specialist/ Brand founder.

The category has cracked open in a way I don’t think the rest of the business world has fully noticed yet. Rory Sutherland once said that “working in a restaurant is the best MBA you’re ever going to get.” In a roundabout way, that’s the MBA I’ve been earning my whole life. I just didn’t realise I was enrolled until recently.

So that’s what this newsletter is going to be.

Every Wednesday, I’m going to write about how food and drink brands are actually communicating in the world. What’s brilliant. What the rest of the category should be paying attention to. The common thread is growth and storytelling.

This is not the polished case study version. I want you to see the seams.

The founder’s voice built a loyal following before the product was even on shelves. The packaging decision took six months.

The launch that should have failed but didn’t, and the one that should have worked but flopped.

The communications choices that are rewriting the rules, and the ones that are wasting everyone’s money.

I’ll bring you into the rooms I’m in. The ones I’m lucky enough to be invited to, and the ones I’m still working my way towards.

A few things already on the list:

• How Tabasco has stayed culturally relevant for over 150 years

• What Eat Wasted is doing with pasta made from scrap bread

• How Bold Bean Co made the United Kingdom obsessed with beans

• The growth playbook behind David’s Protein Bar

• Whether ube can actually break through globally or stay a niche darling

• Why Minor Figures keep refusing to play the game everyone else is playing.

If any of that sounds like your kind of thing, stick around.

And if you want to actually talk, email me at hello@typeharder.com. Tell me a brand you want me to study. Tell me what you’re building.

Or just say hi and tell me how you found this. I read every email that comes in, and the best ideas I write about almost always start as a reply from someone on the other end of the inbox.

See you next Wednesday.

Bea

Last week in London, I had lunch with Doris Lam. We'd been online mutuals for months, but this was our first real-world meet-up.

Doris is a trained journalist. She’s written for Serious Eats, BBC, Telegraph, South China Morning Post, and Tatler Asia. These days, she's also a chef, and that pivot is what I wanted to understand.

What struck me wasn't just that she moved from writing to cooking. It was how she did it.

The Stagière Mentality

Doris treated her transition the same way a young chef treats a stage: the unglamorous rite of passage where you work (usually unpaid) in someone else's kitchen, doing the lowest of low-level tasks, just for the chance to learn.

It's humbling, physically exhausting, and for those serious about their craft, non-negotiable.

Rather than jumping into a new role with the confidence of a published writer, Doris chose to unlearn. She moved to the Lake District for a year-long apprenticeship.

Then she kept staging at restaurants, doing prep work and absorbing everything. When we met, she was staging at two London restaurants, Jackson Boxer's Dove and Angelina.

Why? Because she wanted to know what it was really like to be in the kitchen.

"I'd see food writers criticize chefs or menus without having ever worked in a kitchen. I didn't want to be that person. I wanted to understand what was really going on behind the scenes."

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Credentials vs. Character

That mindset (the stagière mentality) is what separates performative pivots from real ones.

It's easy to buy a certificate. It's harder to offer yourself up, unpaid, and say, "I'll wash the spinach if I get to watch how you sear the scallops."

Today, Doris is planning another apprenticeship in Glasgow at a restaurant specializing in seafood led by a female chef. She just keeps going.

But what struck me most is how she approached building community when she moved to Italy. She started Be My Amico and organized her first event: a cappuccino walk. At first, she was fearful that no one would show up. But people did.

Now she hosts cookbook clubs and taco nights. She's not waiting for permission to contribute value. She's doing what the best stagières do: observing, offering, experimenting.

The Rules of Staging (Any Industry)

In restaurants, stagières are taught to arrive early. Wear comfortable shoes. Keep a notepad. Ask questions.

The same principles apply to entering any new industry.

The best reinventions don't come from proving you're good. They come from being willing to be bad for a while.

The Takeaway

Your pivot doesn't require abandoning your past. It's about staging your skills in a new context.

Doris didn't leave journalism. She's using a journalist's lens to learn the kitchen from the inside out.

Sometimes, the bravest thing you can do is take your best skill and re-stage it somewhere completely unfamiliar.

Two Actions You Can Take:

1. Stage your way in. Shadow, volunteer, intern, help out. Anything to get real exposure. Not the polished version. The actual rhythm of the work.

2. Don't wait to "arrive" before you build community. Create, connect, and contribute while you're still learning. That's where the trust forms.

🎧 Listen to the Full Conversation

"I just wanted to understand what was going on behind the food I was writing about."

Key Highlights:

• Why she left journalism to become a chef

• Navigating strict Asian parents and redefining "success"

• Her culinary apprenticeship in a remote UK village

• What it's really like working in kitchens as a woman

• How social media helped her build a real-life community

• The joy and courage of solo dining

• Advice for career shifters and food creatives

• Her money mindset and saving for creative freedom

• Why Hong Kong is a culinary powerhouse

Three Things Worth Noting:

• Solo dining teaches you to pay attention like a stagière: no distractions, just details.

• A financial safety net gives you the courage to pursue learning over immediate earning. (Doris started reading personal finance books at 18.)

• Ask the juniors. You'll get the truth. They know what it's really like.

The most interesting people in food (and in life) aren't just those with impressive résumés. They're the ones who've staged their way into understanding.

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What to Expect from This Newsletter

In the next issue, I'll reflect on everything I've learned from these conversations—the patterns, the surprises, and the advice that keeps coming up.

Going forward, I'm thinking about mixing things up:

• One deep conversation with someone fascinating

• A profile of someone who's built something impressive (or a business breakdown)

• And some personal essays in between!

But honestly…I want to know what resonates with you. What stories do you find yourself thinking about days later? What would you like me to dig into more?

Hit reply and tell me what you're curious about.

Last weekend at a meetup, someone asked the question we've all wrestled with:

He was considering pivoting from tech sales to any role in the sports industry. I used to think these were mutually exclusive.

I spent 7 months teaching 100 teens in Bhutan. I interned at a love institute, where I worked with therapists and relationship coaches. I bounced between producing content for creators and wondered if I should become a therapist myself or stick with my communications work in the food and beverage space. It felt scattered as if I couldn't commit to anything.

Then I had dinner at Chef Romain Dupeyré's restaurant Racines in Hong Kong.

Watching Chef Romain stand in line while engaging in so much banter with his customers and team, and delivering high-quality food, I knew I had to speak with him. We discussed his journey in building Racines, an intimate restaurant in Hong Kong that showcases the best of his memories, skills, and knowledge.

It's a cliché you always hear, but I kid you not - every dish told a story and every flavor was intentional. But what struck me most was how Romain's journey was one that continually pursued excellence.

At 15, while most kids were playing video games, Romain was working 40 minutes from home in a two-Michelin-starred restaurant. He wasn't "following his passion" but was being intentional. Every move, from Ireland to Australia, to Bangkok, and then to Hong Kong, wasn't random. He was honing his skills, selecting mentors, and determining the kind of life he wanted to build.

"Because my parents split up when I was quite young, my brother and I got a lot of responsibility at home... We were already kids then, doing things on our own. So with work, this made me grow up quicker."

Entering the workforce is one way to find out what is for you and what’s not. But it takes a sense of maturity, reflection and being surrounded by brilliant people to push you to be better. (If you’re in your 20s or thinking of a career pivot, listen to this.)

The Ikigai reality check

Sitting in Racines, tasting dishes that perfectly balanced French technique and a respect for ingredients, I realized Chef Romain had found his Ikigai, his "raison d'être" (reason for being). It's not just about passion. It's about finding where four things overlap:

• What you love (your interests, what energizes you)

• What you're good at (your natural talents + developed skills)

• What the world needs (problems you can solve, gaps you see)

• What you can be paid for (market demand, economic reality)

Your sweet spot is the center where all four overlap. So, I disagree with just following your passion. Make sure the four above are in sync.

When Romain talks about Racines, you can hear all four elements: his love for French technique, his skill built over 20 years, the need for authentic French dining in Hong Kong, and yes—the business that sustains it all. He chose partners who could teach him things he didn't know, as he was confident in his ability to lead and manage a kitchen. The rest, he was open to being guided.

"I'm ready to do my own thing and to create my restaurants around me... Because you feel like you have more freedom to express yourself through food.

What this means for you (and me)

My theory after years of trying different paths: Choose the path with least friction, where opportunities naturally emerge and build on your existing skills and experience. Keep refining how you position and introduce yourself.

My time in Bhutan taught me about the power of storytelling and how brands connect with people across cultures. The Love Institute taught me how relationships truly work, not just personal ones but also professional partnerships and team dynamics. Working with creators revealed the importance of authentic brand-building and the power of influence. None of it was wasted. It all feeds into what I do now.

I sit at the intersection of marketing, storytelling, and growth for brands in the culinary and hospitality industries. Most food entrepreneurs and chefs struggle to communicate their brand story or connect meaningfully with their audience. My training in journalism and communications sharpened this skill, but I've learned that great food without great storytelling often goes unnoticed.

Don't be afraid to "join" new opportunities. Try them out and see what you can learn. You don't need to have it all figured out, but you do need to be honest about where you are:

If you're feeling drained, you may be in a job that pays well but doesn't align with your passions or strengths.

If you're passionate but financially struggling, you may need to bridge the gap between what you love and what pays.

If you're skilled at something but feel bored, perhaps you're tackling the wrong problems.

The crucial question: What work do you love to do? What are your least favorites? Delegate those.

Your next move

Take 30 minutes this week for an Ikigai audit:

1. List what energizes you (not what you think should)

2. Inventory your fundamental skills (including the ones you take for granted)

3. Identify problems you genuinely want to solve

4. Research what people will pay for

Then ask: What's one small step I can take toward the overlap? You can send me what you come up with, and I can send some ideas to consider!

One thing to remember: It's not about following your passion. It's about building your Ikigai and being patient enough to let it evolve.

Two actions you can take:

1️⃣ Do the Ikigai exercise this week

2️⃣ Listen to my conversation with Chef Romain for a lesson in intentional career building

Tell me: What's one small step you're taking toward your Ikigai this week? Hit reply. I read every single one. — Bea

P.S.: That Chef Romain episode is available here if you'd like to hear how someone built a Michelin-starred restaurant by being strategic about every single move. The dining experience at Racines was odd to the beauty of French cuisine and talent.

What’s On Your Plate offers a bi-weekly look behind the scenes of the food and hospitality world, from culinary schools to food brands.

I share lessons from my work in the industry and profile chefs, founders, and creatives shaping how we eat and work.

This is for students, entrepreneurs, and professionals seeking to explore the various ways to build a life and career in the food industry.

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Last month, an aspiring food writer asked me: "How do I get editors to take me seriously when I have no clips?"

It's the catch-22 every aspiring food writer faces. You need experience to get work, but you need work to get experience.

This week, I talked to someone who cracked that exact code almost ten years ago.

Bettina Makalintal now breaks food stories for Eater. But in 2015, she had no writing background, no editor connections, and no published clips.

Her first food piece was a story about a Filipino pop-up in Boston run by two siblings.

How she got there and what happened after is a lesson in persistence and diligence.

The Library Strategy

Here's what Bettina did that most people won't:

She went to the library with her husband (also trying to break into tech journalism) and read magazines cover to cover. No skimming or doom scrolling. She read every single word of the magazines she wanted to write for.

"We would look through a magazine piece and be like, okay, a piece in the front section of Bon Appétit is structured this way, it's this many words, this is how they typically approach it."

They reverse-engineered the formulas, studied the tone, counted words and analyzed structure. Then they tried to imitate it.

The insight: "I'm not good at math, but I can make a sentence sound pretty good. I just needed to figure out the specific words people use when talking about food professionally."

The Follow Up Game

Getting that first Boston Globe piece wasn't about connections or luck. It was about persistence.

"I sent that editor so many emails just being like, 'Hey, just following up on this pitch. I promise you I can write this story.'"

Most people send one email and give up. Bettina kept following up until someone said yes.

The breakthrough: "Once I got that first piece, it really ended up being the biggest hurdle. Then I could pitch other editors and say, 'Look, I have this piece in a legitimate publication.'"

Workplace Education

Bettina's career path tells the story of modern food media:

Munchies (Vice) — "We could be irreverent, silly, even rude sometimes. We weren't concerned with what other publications were doing."

Bon Appétit — "Going from somewhere so digital-first to traditional print media with established norms and workflows. It was interesting to see behind the scenes of something I'd studied for so long."

Eater — "A midpoint of the two. Digital-forward but with authority to tackle big stories. If you're really into something, you can run with it."

Each job wasn't just a paycheck. It was education in what kind of writer she wanted to become.

The Dinner Party Test

Bettina's secret weapon is she writes about what people are actually talking about.

"If we're talking about something a lot in our Slack, or having conversations with friends about it, we have to pursue this. Especially because this is clearly a conversation happening outside our hyper-obsessed food niche."

The egg crisis piece that went viral started because everyone at Eater kept talking about eggs.

The Ina Garten memoir review that said what everyone was thinking was dinner party conversation material.

The formula: Real-life relevance + insider knowledge = stories that matter.

The Confidence Paradox

Here's what surprised me: Bettina still gets nervous before publishing anything.

"I'm a very sensitive person and it still gets to me. Every time I publish anything, I'm like, 'Oh, maybe people will be mad at me for this.'"

But she publishes anyway. Because the work matters more than the fear.

The lesson: Confidence isn't the absence of fear. It's doing the work despite it.

Questions You Can Ask Yourself:

If you're trying to break into food writing:

• What publications do you actually read? Study them like textbooks

• What are your friends talking about that isn't being covered?

• Are you willing to follow up five times when most people give up after one?

If you're a chef or restaurateur looking for coverage:

• Does your story fit what this writer actually covers? (Bettina doesn't cover openings, by the way!)

• Are you reaching out with context, or just saying "we opened"?

• What makes you different enough to be worth writing about?

If you're pivoting careers:

• What skills transfer from your current world to your desired world?

• Are you studying the new industry like Bettina studied magazines?

• Do you have the patience for the long game of building credibility?

Bottom Line

Ten years ago, Bettina had no clips, no connections, no formal training.

Today, when I want to know what's really happening in food, I read her work.

The difference is she did the work most people won't do. She studied obsessively. She followed up relentlessly. She wrote about what mattered to real people, not just food insiders.

"I think you always have to be thinking about the world through the lens of: could this be a story?"

Your breakthrough isn't waiting for permission. It's waiting for you to do the work.

What's your version of the library strategy?

What industry are you studying, and how deeply are you really digging?

—Bea

PS. Trying a new format! Thanks to for giving me feedback on this newsletter.

Listen to this episode and tell me what you think ;)

What’s On Your Plate is a bi-weekly look behind the scenes of the food and hospitality world — from culinary school to food brands to startup kitchens.

I share lessons from my work in the industry and profile chefs, founders, and creatives shaping how we eat and work.

This is for students, entrepreneurs, and professionals exploring the many ways to build a life & career in food.

Subscribe now

A good soul recently reached out to me and said,

“Hey, there’s a chef who won MasterChef Greece last year. He’s in Manila. Want to interview him?”

Without even blinking, I said yes.

You might not know something about me: I’ve always loved the MasterChef universe — especially Professionals UK. Years ago, while interning for a food publication in Melbourne, I somehow found myself on the set of MasterChef during a Marco Pierre White episode. I was a diner that day, seated under a blinding light, with producers quietly circling tables asking for soundbites about the dishes.

It was magic — but also surreal. Behind the scenes, the reality was more sweat than spectacle.

This is why this conversation with Chef Lefteris means so much.

He’s not your typical reality show star. He didn’t grow up dreaming of cooking competitions. He wasn’t groomed for TV. When the show called him, he almost didn’t go.

But when he walked into the MasterChef kitchen, he made a quiet decision:

“If I’m doing this, I’m doing it to win.”

And that’s exactly what he did.

🧑‍🍳 WHO IS CHEF LEFTERIS ZAFEIROPOULOS?

• Born in Greece. Studied art then shifted to something more joyful, cooking!

• Started his culinary career in a casino kitchen, filling buffet trays.

• Worked 18–19 hour shifts in fine dining restaurants in Athens and London.

• Won MasterChef Greece in 2024, where over 6 million people watched.

• Now traveling the world to explore ingredients, kitchens, and cultures.

🔥 WHAT STOOD OUT

📺 He never aimed for the spotlight.
Lefteris wasn’t one of those contestants who practiced for the cameras. He didn’t even watch past seasons. He said yes to MasterChef after producers reached out — and his prep was 12 years of memory.

📚 He never settled.
“It took five years of cooking before I felt like I knew what I was doing.” That hesitation never fully left — and it keeps him sharp.

💔 Sacrifice was the entry fee.
At one point, he worked 9 AM to 3 AM every day, with no days off. Friends left. Holidays were skipped. “But if you know your goals,” he said, “you’ll accept the cost.”

🧂 5 LESSONS

1. Start fast, learn faster.
   In his first job, Lefteris rushed through buffet refills so he could ask chefs to teach him more. "The faster I finished, the more I could learn."

2. Push until discomfort feels normal.
   In London, he worked through cultural barriers and brutal shifts under Jason Atherton's team. “If you can survive a London kitchen, you can survive anywhere.”

3. You’re not behind. You’re building.
   Even after 13 years in kitchens, Lefteris said, “I always feel like I’m behind. That’s how I know I’m still improving.”

4. Preparation is useful. Practice is better.
   Many contestants brought notebooks of pre-made recipes. Lefteris brought nothing but experience. “I didn’t know the format. But I knew how to cook.”

5. Build skill before building brand.
   He didn’t chase clout. He chased consistency. Win or lose, he knew he had something to offer after years of working.

🧠 WHAT I’M THINKING ABOUT

• You won’t learn anything unless you ruin food first.
  He said it casually, but it’s a creative truth. Mastery comes after failure, not before it. He shared the time he ruined 30 liters of mayo.

• Your identity as a chef is built in the hours no one sees.
  It’s built when you’re off the clock, staying to clean, asking questions, tweaking one more version of a dish no one will taste tonight.

Watch the episode here.

Follow him.

🧃 WHAT I LOVED THIS WEEK

1. READ: 🍰 Cake Picnic just staged an unforgettable (and very photogenic) food event: See how they did it

2. READ/WATCH: 🌶 The story behind Sriracha: How a refugee-created hot sauce became a global staple

3. LISTEN: 🐟 Food startups to learn from: Fishwife, Banza, and Barnanaon How I Built This podcast. Listen here.

✅ TWO ACTIONS YOU CAN TAKE

1. Ask to shadow someone better than you.
   Finish your shift early, then hang back. Watch someone make a sauce you’ve never touched. Repeat it until it’s second nature.

2. Set your personal benchmark — and raise it.
   Don’t just ask, “Is this dish good?” Ask, “How can I make this better tomorrow?”

📌 CLOSING THOUGHT

MasterChef isn’t the story.
It’s just the trailer.

The story is told in 12-hour prep days. In dishes that fall flat. In opportunities taken before you're ready. In goals so private no one claps for them.

Chef Lefteris reminded me that success in food—or anywhere else—comes from obsession with the process, not the prize.

If you’re in the middle of your own long stretch and wondering if it’s working, it is.

Until next time, 
Stay curious. Stay cooking.

What’s On Your Plate is a compilation of stories and insights from inside the food and hospitality industry. Every two weeks, I profile chefs, founders, and industry players shaping how we eat, cook, and do business. It is for culinary students, entrepreneurs, and food-obsessed readers who want more than pretty plates.

Subscribe now

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It's been a while!

Quick personal update: I took a short break — my sister got married, and I visited Japan. Now I'm back with a lineup of fascinating interviews ready to share: a New York-based food journalist, a French chef in Hong Kong, and a chef from Greece.

These conversations are just the beginning. My goal is to introduce you to remarkable people in the food world who all share one thing in common: none of them followed a straight path. Their careers twist, turn, and sometimes double back — proving there's no single route to success in food.

First up, a chocolatier whose journey from data entry to crafting Filipino-inspired luxury chocolates might just change how you think about your own career path.

⏯️ Podcast

1. Challenge Family Expectations When Your Path Feels Different.

Christian Valdes was living the American work ethic—school by day, multiple jobs by night. "I was a very industrious student because not only was I in school full time, I was also working two to three jobs at any given time," he explained. "That was the American dream. You work while in school, so when you're 17 or 18 you can move out and be independent."

His parents in the Philippines saw it differently. "You're corrupted by work," they told him, urging him to prioritize education in the Philippines instead.

Christian agreed, assuming he wouldn't meet Philippine education standards and could quickly return to America. "I'll keep them happy. I'll go out there and go back to the States," he recalled thinking. To his surprise, he excelled in the entrance exams.

This unexpected success kept him in the Philippines, reconnecting him with family and shifting his mindset. It eventually steered him away from unfulfilling jobs like medical insurance data encoding—"Eight hours of staring at a computer screen, reading applications and doctor's handwriting... that's not fun."

2. One Meaningful Gift Can Change Your Career Trajectory.

The turning point came when a friend interning at Mandarin Oriental gave Christian a box of handmade chocolates. "I was flabbergasted," Christian shared. "I was like, wow, this is beautiful. I want to be able to make it."

This same friend taught him the craft, igniting a passion that began with making chocolates for friends and family. What started as a hobby expanded into formal training in Belgium and France, eventually becoming CMV Txokolat.

3. Your Cultural Heritage Is Your Greatest Innovation Asset.

Christian's chocolates stand out through his bold incorporation of Filipino flavors:

Green Mango Bagoong Bon Bon: Dark chocolate with green mango gel, bagoong ganache, and homemade patis salt.

Etag: Smoked pork fat ganache with tomato gel, capturing the essence of Baguio.

Gumamela: Inspired by childhood memories of Filipino youth playing with gelatin flour

These aren't just confections but cultural narratives, connecting consumers with Filipino heritage through unexpected combinations.

4. Great Teams Need Cultivation, Not Just Management.

When managing his team of 12, Christian applies a natural approach:

"Your business is the garden. If you as a gardener have the right seeds, the right inputs to help your garden grow—your team is like the plants and the trees. With the right sunlight, the right environment, the right materials, they will grow."

This perspective transforms team development from management into cultivation. He puts this philosophy into practice through daily check-ins at the beginning and end of each workday, creating a rhythm that nurtures both accountability and growth.

5. Transparency About Challenges Builds Customer Trust.

On sustainability, Christian is refreshingly straightforward:

"In the chocolate industry, sustainability is quite difficult. The larger you get, the less sustainable because you have more need for materials, for packaging, your carbon footprint goes up."

Yet he remains committed to finding balanced solutions, recognizing that tomorrow's chocolate brands must reconcile luxury with responsibility.

6. Even Passion Projects Require Deliberate Disconnection

For all his passion, Christian understands the importance of disconnecting. Despite a previous article mistakenly describing him as a surfer (he's only surfed twice), his outlet is swimming. Whether for 20 minutes or four hours, it helps him reset.

Topics we cover:

• Learning chocolate craftsmanship in Belgium and France

• How Filipino heritage shapes innovative flavor combinations

• The viral Dubai chocolate controversy and creating alternatives

• Managing a team of 12 using the "garden" philosophy

• Sustainability challenges in the chocolate industry

• Finding balance through swimming and avoiding burnout

• Pricing strategy for luxury chocolate in a price-conscious market

👉 Listen to the full episode

👉 Follow Chef Christian

👉Try his chocolates (I love the Pomelo Dark Chocolate bar!)

Footnotes:

• Chef Bram - His instructor in Antwerp, Belgium at Chocolate World, who taught him traditional Belgian chocolate techniques and design methods for efficiency.

• Chloe Doutre Roussel -The instructor in Paris who taught him to appreciate fine cacao quality, sustainability, and the creation of unique chocolates.

• Plaq Chocolate - Christian notes that they were one of the first brands to champion fine cacao.

• Chef Amado (Luis Amado) - A chocolatier whose designs Christian greatly admires. He mentioned wanting to take classes with him when Chef Amado visits Southeast Asia.

• Scharffen Berger - A formative influence from his childhood (before they sold to Hershey's), whose chocolate variety box showed him how different percentages could create complex flavor profiles "like fine wine."

💎What I’m Loving Right Now

• Simple Marketing for Smart People by Tiago Forte and Billy Broas - I’ve been geeking on marketing principles applicable to food businesses. A summary will be in the following newsletter.

• 1,387 Cakes in One Picnic in San Francisco - This struck a cord with many people on Instagram. This is a perfect example of how food events can stand out.

• ChatGPT’s image generator - You would’ve seen all the Studio Ghibli images online, but these are my favorite ways to use the tool in the food space (from X).

🎯Two Actions You Can Take:

✅ Trace Your Food Memories: What childhood food experiences still resonate with you? Could they inspire your next creation?

✅ Create Your "Inspiration Library": Collect flavors, techniques, or concepts that intrigue you, even if they seem disconnected from your current work. Christian draws inspiration from varied sources, from taxi conversations about gin pomelo to traditional ingredients like kiniing and bagoong.

Until next time,

Bea

P.S. Have you experimented with unusual flavor combinations in your cooking?

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What’s On Your Plate is a compilation of stories and insights from inside the food and hospitality industry. Every two weeks, I profile chefs, founders, and industry players shaping how we eat, cook, and do business. It is for culinary students, entrepreneurs, and food-obsessed readers who want more than pretty plates.

The moment that changed everything for Noah Mayrand wasn't in a high-end kitchen or during a perfect service. It was in the waters, shucking an oyster he had grown himself.

After years of working in kitchens—from catering gigs to butchering—Noah pivoted- leaving the kitchen entirely to become an oyster farmer in Martha’s Vineyard. It’s a place where 30,000 people live in. Yet, it swells to 100,000 people in peak times, including the Obamas, Beyonce, and many more.

Today, as the founder of Tisbury Oyster Co., Noah is part of a growing movement of culinary professionals who've discovered that their calling is not just cooking great ingredients but growing them.

His story powerfully reminds us that the path forward sometimes means getting closer to the beginning in food.

He had worked up, developing specialized skills in whole-animal butchery and nose-to-tail cooking. But farm visits to his suppliers sparked something different:

That realization—magic happens before ingredients reach the kitchen—changed everything.

⏯️ Podcast

One of the most fascinating aspects of Noah's story is that he attributes his culinary development to cross-country drives, where he stopped to eat at restaurants that sparked his creativity.

Here’s a tip: When dining alone, Noah naturally engaged with the people around him—like when he sat next to a buffalo rancher during a six-course buffalo meal. These encounters became masterclasses in food stories and techniques.

5 Career Lessons From A Chef Who Pivoted To Oyster Farming

1. Get Close to the Source

Noah realized his true passion wasn't just cooking food but understanding where it came from:

"Getting closer to the source of food led me to becoming a farmer rather than being a chef."

This farm-to-table mindset not only changed his career but also transformed his entire perspective on the quality and authenticity of food.

2. Work for Others Before Starting Your Own

Before launching Tisbury Oyster Co., Noah spent years working for established oyster farmers. If you have a business idea, before diving in, study or work for people doing the same thing.

This apprenticeship approach taught him techniques and the business realities he'd face as an entrepreneur.

3. Embrace Project-Based Learning

Noah's art school background taught him the value of hands-on experience:

"I'm a very visual learner. Even if I read a recipe and I didn't do it physically in my kitchen, it would slip out of my mind."

Abstract knowledge fades, but skills developed through projects stick forever—a lesson that applies across the culinary world.

4. Master the Art of Storytelling

Noah doesn't just farm oysters—he serves them directly at weddings, sharing their story himself:

"Having a good story behind the product is a very helpful sales tactic. And people really appreciate smaller farms now."

The most successful food businesses sell more than products; they sell narratives that connect consumers to their origins.

5. It's OK to Be a Jack of All Trades

In kitchens, Noah was called a "rounder" who could handle multiple stations and tasks. This adaptability became his greatest asset as an entrepreneur:

"You gotta be a farmer and you gotta be a fisherman and you gotta be a boat person. You gotta be a lot of things."

Far from being a disadvantage, his varied experience allows him to handle everything from equipment maintenance to wedding catering to marketing.

Culinary Background + Producer Knowledge

Noah's chef experience gave him unique advantages as an oyster farmer:

• Understanding flavor development: He knows exactly how water conditions affect the taste

• Customer perspective: He can anticipate what chefs need and want

• Storytelling ability: He narrates the oyster's journey at raw bars, creating premium experiences

He puts it: "People love that conversation of receiving something from the farmer, but also from somebody that knows so deeply about the oyster."

Next time you serve (or enjoy) oysters, try Noah's approach:

• First bite: Always try it "naked" (no sauce) to understand the true flavor

• Get creative. Beyond lemon, experiment with passion fruit or guava for tropical notes

• Make a proper mignonette sauce. Recipe below:
  1/4 cup minced shallots
  1 1/2 cup champagne vinegar or vinegar of your choice
  1 1/2 tsp fresh cracked black pepper
  1 tbsp sugar
  
  Mix all ingredients until the sugar dissolves. Marinate for at least two hours, then serve atop your oysters.

Topics we cover:

• Starting in Martha's Vineyard's catering scene

• The game-changing cross-country food expedition

• Mastering nose-to-tail cooking

• Why he left the kitchen for the ocean

• The science and business of oyster farming

• Running a seasonal business in a tourist economy

👉 Listen to the full episode

👉Follow him.

🎯Two Actions You Can Take:

✅ Develop your palate intentionally: Plan a solo dining experience where you focus entirely on the flavors, textures, and techniques in each dish.

✅ Get closer to your ingredients: Visit a local producer who supplies something you use regularly. Understanding their process will transform how you work with their product.

💎Books He Loved:

• "The Big Oyster: History of The Half Shell" by Mark Kurlansky - A historical look at how oysters shaped New York's culinary landscape

• "White Heat" by Marco Pierre White - One of Noah's favorite chef books

Typing harder,

Bea

Also, Have you ever had an ingredient or food experience that changed your career trajectory? If so, reply and let me know—I'd love to hear about it!

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If you found this valuable, please forward it to a friend in the F&B industry who might benefit from this newsletter.

There's a common misconception that PR is about getting press coverage or social media buzz. But, as I learned in my recent conversation with Joey Suarez, managing consultant at Eat Public Relations, it's much more nuanced than that.

"I can show people where the door is, but for them to come back, that's on the client," Joey told me during our podcast interview. This simple yet powerful insight perfectly captures what makes great restaurant PR work—it's about creating the initial momentum. Still, success ultimately depends on the restaurant or food business delivering an exceptional experience.

⏯️ Podcast

Who is Joey? He leads the PR of acclaimed establishments like Lusso, a mano, and Hapag. He loves and geeks out on food and the business behind it.

In this conversation, I had a lot of takeaways:

Embrace the snowball effect.

Joey uses a beautiful analogy to describe effective PR: "I send down a snowball. What I'd like to see at the end is literally an avalanche of people posting and talking about your product, talking about your restaurant." But how do you create this avalanche? It starts with something many struggle with: knowing and articulating your story.

Know your story.

He spends hours—sometimes days—just talking with his clients because he understands that authentic storytelling is the foundation of effective PR.

"I spend hours and hours just talking about who they are, what their product is, what their story is," he explains. It's not just about crafting press releases or managing social media; it's about helping food entrepreneurs and chefs find their voice and narrative.

Understand the reality behind multi-channel PR.

While it's tempting to focus only on social media, Joey emphasizes that great PR requires presence across multiple channels. Yes, if you're working with limited resources, start with Instagram. But remember that people often discover you on social media, and then Google you for more information. That's where having depth of coverage becomes crucial.

🥞 Hot Take: Think of PR like building a house. Social media might be your front door—it's where people first see you. But to keep the house standing, you need a solid foundation (your story), good infrastructure (press coverage and long-form content), and regular maintenance (consistent engagement). The goal isn't just to get people through the door; it's to give them reasons to keep coming back.

As Joey puts it, "The cascade of information now is so complex that you have to be on multiple levels all the time." What worked a decade ago—having only print coverage or social media—isn't enough anymore. Your story needs to exist everywhere your potential customers might look for it.

While trendy reels might catch attention, deeper storytelling builds lasting connections with your audience. Don't chase viral moments at the expense of substance.

Remove the barriers so that media and influencers can create better stories.

Joey is one of the few PR professionals I know who considers the total package: the dining experience of media or influencers, visuals, press releases, and interviews. He just gets it. If you are a PR professional, entrepreneur, or chef, consider what you’re giving the people you invite. Do they have everything they need to write or create a story?

Read more long-form, please.

Joey shared some books that shaped his understanding of food and communication:

• "The Third Plate" by Dan Barber – He shared that this book changed his perspective.

• "Garlic and Sapphires" by Ruth Reichl – His guidebook as a food writer

• Anthony Bourdain's works - like everyone else!

• "On Food and Cooking" by Harold McGee—He loves to read this book for fun and to geek out.

His best advice is to choose a PR consultant who you connect with. We break down a lot of best practices in this conversation. If you're considering hiring PR for your restaurant or food business, this is an episode you’ll get lots of value in.

Topics we cover:

• Why knowing your story is essential for PR success

• Managing client expectations in PR

• Choosing the right social media platforms

• Handling negative online feedback

• Building long-term media relationships

• The power of word-of-mouth marketing

👉 Listen to the full episode

💎Here are two PR voices you need to follow:

Sometimes, you can get inspiration from outside the food industry. I love reading the content of these PR professionals in the tech industry:

• Lulu Meservey (@lulumeservey)

• PR Carly (@PRcarly)

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🎯Two Actions You Can Take:

✅ Write Your Story: Take an hour to write down your story – why you started, why you do what you do, what drives you, what your product is, and who you're trying to reach. Share it with someone who doesn't know your business and ask if it’s clear. (Feel free to send it to me – I'd love to read it!)

✅ Watch This Masterclass: Check out Lulu's video masterclass on PR for practical tips on modern communication strategies.

🌶️ Final Thoughts

What struck me most about my conversation with Joey was his emphasis on authenticity. "People have a better BS radar nowadays," he noted. This is why knowing your story is powerful.

PR isn't just about getting coverage; it's about creating genuine connections that lead to lasting relationships with your audience.

Remember, PR is a long-term game. It's not about quick wins or viral moments; it's about building sustainable momentum that grows naturally over time. Joey says, "Word of mouth will always be the most powerful tool."

🗣️ I'd love to hear your thoughts! What's your experience with PR in the food industry? Have you struggled with telling your story?

Reply to this email, and let's chat about it.

Typing away,

Bea

💭 Random thoughts from this week’s topic and how I’ve applied it at the culinary school (CCA Manila):

If you found this valuable, please forward it to a friend in the F&B industry who might benefit from this newsletter.

👇 Subscribe if you want to build a career in food and drink.

What's On Your Plate

Every two weeks, I bring you profiles of people in the food and hospitality industry. Whether you're a culinary student, hospitality entrepreneur, or professional, each issue delivers strategies, wisdom, and inspiration.

By Bea Trinidad ☕️

At the start of my first restaurant business in Melbourne, two branding consultants began chatting about “rebranding.” They listed their achievements, and after that, they sent me a quote for a whopping $50,000. I was a first-time business owner in an old Mexican bar and was freaked out by such a fee.

Fast forward to this day, I am asked about finding good consultants—it's become a weekly conversation in my inbox or DMs. Everyone seems to have a horror story about consultants who overpromised, underdelivered, and disappeared when things got tough. However, getting a good consultant can greatly improve efficiency and business growth.

My conversation with Alaa Alhadad, founder of House of Forte, was a breath of fresh air. As a food and beverage consultant in the UAE, she wants to approach consulting with more aftercare. Think of it as having a warranty for your Rimowa suitcase. 

⏯️ Podcast

A bit about her journey: she started as a restaurant supervisor, transformed struggling venues into successes, launched three homegrown concepts with Leopard Pots Hospitality, and now runs House of Forte. She’s also travelled to several countries for work, studying concepts that could work in UAE.

What sets her apart isn't just her decade of experience – her philosophy that consultants should be true partners in your success.

👩‍💻What A Good Consultant Looks Like

Here's what I've learned from both sides of the table:

1. They Listen First - Good consultants spend more time asking about your vision than talking about their past wins. When Alaa meets clients, she prioritizes understanding their business before suggesting solutions.

2. They Get Their Hands Dirty - "Even if you grow and go up the ladder, it doesn't mean that you will stop doing things with your hands," Alaa told me. The best consultants aren't afraid to work alongside your team.

3. They Stay Around - Look for consultants who offer post-project support. At House of Forte, they provide 2-3 months of follow-up to ensure their solutions work.

🎙️What I learned from our conversation

During our talk, Alaa shared six opportunities for reshaping the industry:

1. Experience-First Dining: Consumers no longer want to eat – they want entertainment, connection, and stories. Experiential dining is transforming how restaurants design their spaces and services.

2. Wellness Integration: Social clubs combine fitness with food, creating spaces where people can practice yoga, enjoy healthy meals, and connect with others. It's about nourishing both body and community.

3. Ethical Sourcing: The coffee industry is leading this charge, with consumers demanding transparency about how their daily cup impacts farmers. This trend is spreading across all F&B sectors.

4. Natural Food Revival: Fermentation and traditional techniques are making a comeback. In UAE, sourdough has symbolised this return to natural processes.

5. Fashion Meets Food: Luxury brands are entering F&B unexpectedly – from Louis Vuitton croissants and Zara Cafe to Rimowa x La Marzocco collaborations. It's about creating lifestyle experiences.

6. Smart Sustainability: Restaurants are moving beyond eco-friendly packaging to explore innovative zero-waste solutions and support marine life sustainability.

🎧 Final Thoughts

Last week, I watched Danica, one of our culinary students, compete in a 10-minute competition during Chef Gordon Ramsay’s visit to Manila. She won, and the news made it to the headlines.

Someone asked me, “What do you do with 15 minutes of fame?” It reminded me of what Alaa said about investing time in yourself early on. Every student has a culinary dream; whether to launch a restaurant or run a school, there are no shortcuts. But you don't have to figure it all out alone.

If you're considering a consultant for your business:

• Don't chase the biggest names. Go for those that are willing to be very hands-on.

• Look for someone who fits your team and the stage you are in.

• Find partners who'll grow with you.

• Ask for their after-care plan.

• Trust your gut – if they're more interested in their portfolio than your vision, keep looking.

• Ask others about their experience with a consultant.

• Make sure they document their process.

👉 Listen to the full episode

👉 Follow Alaa Alhadad

👉 Follow House of Forte

Alaa’s Restaurant Recommendations:

⁠👉 Orfali Bros Bistronomy ⁠

⁠👉 Elkano ⁠

👉 ⁠Desde 1911⁠

👉 ⁠Laffah ⁠- for the best shawarma

⁠👉 Eleven Green⁠ - for a tasty burger

✅ Two Actions You Can Take

1. Do Your Homework: Before hiring a consultant, visit their projects. Talk to their clients. See how they work with teams.

2. Start Small: Test consultants with smaller projects before committing to full engagements. Watch how they handle feedback and adjust their approach.

🚨 Something New & Footnotes

• WGSN's latest F&B forecast

• FEED ME trends newsletter - There are different industries here, but there’s a hospitality section worth reading.

• SnaxShot - for emerging opportunities in the food and beverage space (For paid subscribers only, but so worth it!)

Cheers,

Bea

Also, do you have a consulting story—good or bad? Hit reply. I'd love to hear it and maybe help you avoid the $50K mistakes I almost made.

👇 Subscribe if you want to build a career in food and drink.

What's On Your Plate

Every two weeks, I bring you profiles of people in the food and hospitality industry. Whether you're a culinary student, hospitality entrepreneur, or professional, each issue delivers strategies, wisdom, and inspiration.

By Bea Trinidad ☕️