The Connection Between Cooking Shows on Netflix and Food Manufacturing

You know that your business is interesting. You love how your product is made, the care and craftsmanship throughout the entire manufacturing process. You have employees who love knowing they’ve made great food that feeds the whole province. But you don’t just like making food that feeds people: you demand quality. There’s a long tradition of passionate food makers from eastern Ontario; passion for your product is a subject you could talk about for hours to whoever will listen.

On the flip side, you come home from a long day of creating delicious foods, the foods that chefs all around the province use in their cooking, and find your teen glued to the TV or the phone, watching YouTube or Netflix.

Imagine what it would be like if it you could make manufacturing as “binge-worthy” as Netflix.

Well, making manufacturing binge-worthy might not be as hard as you might think.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a hit Netflix show all about food production, except on the surface it doesn’t seem like that’s what the show is about. You don’t see any food processing factories where employees do mind-numbing repetitive work. In other words, you don’t see any of the negative stereotypes that many people have come to associate with manufacturing. The host of the show, bestselling author and chef, Samin Nosrat, explores the aspect of food we don’t normally think about. It’s even something many cooking shows don’t talk about: how food gets made.

For example, making the miso for miso soup might not sound that interesting. Sure, miso soup is delicious, but in eastern Ontario and North America we’re used to miso coming in ready-made packets. You pretty much add water to a paste and there’s your soup. Try telling your teen you want to teach them how soup paste is made. Now that would be Instagram worthy.

In the second episode of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat Samin shows the process of making traditional miso: the manual, almost intimate process of grinding the soybeans, the delicate and time-consuming aging process, and the end result that is so far from pre-packaged miso you could mistake them for entirely different foods. In each episode of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat you see the pride brimming over in workers who know they are making quality food unlike any other in the world. It’s that passion that millennials crave in their work, and if you can explain that your business has that, in a form similar to the one used by cooking shows on Netflix, you can attract the next generation of workers far easier than ever before.

Use Cooking Shows on Netflix as a Model for Your Social Media Presence

You might think that you can’t replicate the style or approach of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, because you don’t have the kind of marketing budget to make documentaries like Netflix does, and you don’t have a professional film crew at your disposal. This may be true. But what you can do is replicate the spirit and philosophy of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat in your efforts to appeal to young people.

Being passionate about their job is more important to Millennials than it was to the previous two generations. It is the passion of food making that will really attract Millennial workers.

Show off the delicious food you make daily, and how you do it. Get someone who loves food passionately to interview your workers. Show the connection between your product and the enjoyment of food. Explain how your workers are part of a proud tradition, not just cogs in the wheel. Find local food bloggers and invite them to your workplace, let them taste fresh, delicious products, help them understand the manufacturing process, give them some samples to use at home, and your passion for your product will spread.

Here are some other bonus ideas to help spread the passion of your industry:

Start an Instagram account and document the process of making your food, evoking the stye and feel of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.
Start a YouTube account, and upload your own videos inspired by Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. They don’t have to be as long as the Netflix episodes, but you can still evoke Samin’s interview style in a short segment.
Take part in Manufacturing Day, and open your doors to culinary students to get them excited about local food production.