Fostering Partnerships & Collaborations Is The Way Forward In F&B

Anshumala Jan 29, 2021

At Conosh we’ve always been firm believers that working together is one of the best practices to grow organically. Before the pandemic, we worked together with a few F&B brands to curate food experiences. Amidst free-flowing conversations and delicious food, the brands we partnered with seamlessly became part of the experiences. Good times & happy memories created a special place in people's hearts & played a role in helping them remember these brands. The marketing head of a premium beer brand about our collaboration said, “Conosh’s Diwali bash was a superb experience for us, it was good to spend casual time with our potential customers and get to know them better. The event resonated so well with the vibe of the brand - what more could we have asked for.”

The famous Greek Philosopher, Heraclitus, once said, "Change is the only constant." The pandemic did just that. It changed the way people across the world wined and dined. It triggered a major shift away from restaurant dining, leaving many Chefs out of work, but it also resulted in a flourishing business for home chefs, home bakers, and cloud kitchen owners; opening up opportunities beyond their kitchens! Home chefs became a success story and everyone wanted to be a part of it. At the beginning of the lockdown when all of us took to our kitchens in absence of house helps, Lifestyle brands reached out to the home chefs to organize Instagram Lives with easy to make recipes for their followers. Ready to make food/condiments brands collaborated with them to curate “how-to” videos for their customers. Even the book What’s in your Dabba, released during the lockdown, got 60+ Celebrities, Chefs, Home chefs, and Foodies together to share their most favorite and easy-to-make recipes. And to add some fun to the monotony of the lockdown life, Pro Chefs & Home chef swapped recipes and ingredients on youtube! Even Twinkle Khanna tried her hands on “cooking along” with Ranveer Brar. Similar collaborations were happening as one-offs prr-covid but the pandemic taught us to be a lot more resourceful and to do it more often.

At Conosh, we saw the pandemic and the associated depression in the F&B industry as an opportunity for the restaurants and Home-chefs to work & grow together. During a crisis when every business is struggling, the sentiment shared should be cooperative. Remember The Burger King ad, for instance that simply urged consumers to order from any restaurant as the entire industry is down. With that in mind, we started long term collaborations with restaurants which have opened up a world of opportunities for Home chefs and Professional Chefs to work hand-in-hand. The idea was to have a non traditional collaboration which does not revolve around content curation so it provides for larger opportunities. While the Home chefs get to work in larger commercial kitchens and reach a larger audience, Professional Chefs get to learn new things from the vast cultural experiences of Home chefs which lend freshness to restaurant menus and provide sustainable cash flow to the restaurants. Our Kitchen Stories series (in which 13 of our expert home chefs got to display their culinary skills at a popular restaurant in Bangalore) and myriad collaborations with food bloggers, influencers and food authors across both the markets have been very well received by the audience. People could now taste what they earlier only saw on Instagram and Blogs, it gave them an opportunity to try something new!

Similar trends are seen internationally too now and in various forms. Recently, two popular restaurants in Dubai announced that they would be hosting exciting collaborations with Michelin Chefs in January. Brands are actively partnering to have access to different types of audiences and lead to newer and better experiences and are already seeing it as a success. And for that reason in 2021, collaborations would go beyond the traditional realms of Marketing and become part of growth strategies!