When TikTok conquers the food planet

Gone are the days when TikTok was best known to hip-hop dancers and amateur singers. For some time now, a whole culinary platform has taken the social network by storm. And Quebecers are doing quite well there. Overview of the phenomenon.

Sophie Ouimet
Press

Laurent Dagenais was not convinced that his mustard rabbit recipe would interest many people. His girlfriend persuaded him to put it online on his TikTok account, and he was very good at it: the video went viral and was seen by 11.7 million Internet users!

In just nine months on the platform, Laurent Dagenais has 1.1 million subscribers and several other viral videos. His taco recipe, for example, has garnered over 26 million views. It must be said that it is aimed at Internet users in English, so it has conquered the United States market.

“It was really very fast growing,” says the cook, himself trained as a chef. The morning we reach him by phone, he has just left his management job in a catering group to devote himself fully to his personal projects, including the videos he shoots for the social network.

Stories like that of Laurent Dagenais, there are a dime a dozen all over the world, but also here, in Quebec. Frédérike Lachance-Brulotte, author of the Folks & Forks blog, is one of them. Just a year and a half ago, she started posting videos of her recipes on TikTok, also at the suggestion of someone she knew.

“At the beginning, I said to myself: come on, TikTok, it’s just people dancing and doing silly things … I really did not see what the recipes were doing in there”, she says on the phone, joined at her home in Saint-Lambert-de-Lauzon, in Beauce, where she lives with her spouse and daughter Mathilde. “But in the end, I decided to make a video, and it worked,” she is still surprised.

Today, she has 160,000 subscribers on the platform, while they are 50,000 to follow her on Instagram, where she nevertheless reveals a more personal facet of her life. But the difference, according to the blogger, is TikTok’s algorithm, designed so that videos are viewed by exponential numbers of people.

This difference is even reflected in the way she chooses her contracts. “The price for a post on TikTok pays a lot more for me than on Instagram,” she says bluntly. In any case, more and more sponsors are also choosing the first to the detriment of the second.

The influence of TikTok

But TikTok is more than personal success stories. If we talk about it so much, it is because the majority of the culinary trends of the last year were born there. Some have created real tidal waves. Just think of the pancakes-cereals, Dalgona coffee, or even the impeccably folded tortillas.

As for the famous pasta with roasted feta cheese, they caught the attention of Bob the chef, who recreated the recipe in his kitchen. Laurent Dagenais also wanted to try them, but giving them a slightly more sophisticated twist. “I redid the recipe and modified it to make it a little more ‘chef’. It was surely better than the original version, but less simple too, ”he said.

Because indeed, it is not all aces of the kitchen, duly trained as such, or even having a culinary blog, who take the networks by storm. There is a lot of food that is simple, comforting and easy to prepare.

These are the types of recipes that work best for Folks & Forks.

This finding does not surprise Eugenie Delhaye, president of the marketing agency My Little Big Web. “This is content that is going to be presented to a lot of people, and most people, they don’t cook gourmet things. So it’s normal that comfort food is offered and, indeed, it’s something that we see a lot on social networks in general. ”

It is perhaps no coincidence either that this popularity flared up almost at the same time as the pandemic, at a rather unique moment in our lives, adds the specialist. “People have spent a lot more time on the web, whether producing content or consuming it,” she says.

Hypnotizing and ephemeral

The other particularity of TikTok is that it goes fast. Very quickly. Most recipes are presented within one minute, so now is not the time to waste precious seconds on preparation.

This is why we often start by showing the finished result, or almost.

“You can see immediately what it is at first glance,” confirms Frédérike of Folks & Forks about her dishes. No one sees me browning vegetables. Me, I have already prepared everything, and there I show my salad or my omelet immediately, without showing what was there before. ”

All this content is ephemeral, as we will have understood, hence TikTok’s eagerness to offer more and more videos to replace those that we have just consumed. “There is a little hypnotizing side, I think, which works well”, underlines Eugenie Delhaye. Even as a specialist in social networks, she sometimes gets caught up in the game. “Myself, when I use the platform, I watch a video, then another, then another… We don’t realize it , but we just spent 45 minutes looking at various things that didn’t add up much. It’s a bit like fast food, but with content. ”