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It’s almost dinnertime, and you’re stumped: What to eat?
If you don’t want to cook, you’ll likely look on Google or Yelp and peruse the reviews, possibly text a foodie friend for a recommendation or maybe scroll through social media. Open Instagram or TikTok and you may come across a food influencer promoting a restaurant nearby.
The short video might simply showcase the restaurant’s gorgeous ambiance or include a voiceover claiming the food is the best in the area. Either way, your interest is piqued. This is where you’re going to dinner.
The restaurant industry is changing the way it’s marketing itself, and foodies are capitalizing on this shift. Gain a few thousand followers and unlock access to a world of comped meals and even monetary compensation – all for posting videos.
In Silicon Valley, food influencers find large audiences for their social media posts following a surge in social media influencers since the start of the pandemic, when online content consumption doubled as people stayed home and dining out was limited.
Food influencers interviewed for this story say they play an important role in the restaurant industry with their social media posts, which can help market eateries and bring in business at a time when the industry is still struggling in the wake of the pandemic. In turn, influencers can get free meals, more followers to amplify their platform and the gratification of helping a business succeed.
But the inner workings of collaborations between influencers and restaurateurs in this evolving industry remain largely murky to the consumer, and transparency varies when it comes to influencers sharing that a post is the result of a paid partnership. Restaurants with the deepest pockets can fund the most influencers, and the consumer may not be able to tell what’s genuinely worth the hype or if the hype was cleverly manufactured. If reality doesn’t live up to the consumer’s expectations, the restaurant and influencer can both lose credibility.
Christopher Terry, a professor of journalism, law and policy at the University of Minnesota, said that a lack of transparency in disclosing paid collaborations is generally deceptive and that restaurants face the largest potential burden when engaging with an influencer.
By law, businesses trading any material connection for influencer content are responsible for the influencer’s conduct, including ensuring that influencers disclose the material connection following the Federal Trade Commission’s endorsement guidelines.
However, 70%-80% of influencers aren’t compliant, according to Terry’s research, soon to be published in the Case Western Reserve’s Journal of Law. Without proper disclosures, the restaurant could be fined exorbitantly: $44,100 for every person who sees the post multiplied by the number of days that the post is up, he said. While the rules have yet to be enforced, the risk remains, Terry said.
“Influencers don’t like the disclosures because it takes some space and it destroys the organic nature of their content,” he said. “I get that, but they also don’t realize the potential sanctions that they’re dealing with here and the risk they put the businesses that are endorsing them under.”
The rise of food influencing
While food influencing has existed long before TikTok, the growth of the platform has likely contributed to the boom of food influencers, said Allie Tong, a San Francisco resident whose platform @allie.eats has 149,000 followers on Instagram and 115,000 on TikTok.
“Short-form video has really changed the game,” Tong said. “During the pandemic, TikTok became so popular, (and) anyone could get on there and just post a video.”
Tong, who has a bachelor’s degree in business administration, marketing and management, started her food-focused Instagram account in 2015 in an effort to document her food journey. She now has her own content creation and social media management agency.
“Back then, influencers weren’t really a thing, so I never really thought about this being a career,” she said.
About a year after creating her page, restaurant invitations started rolling in.
“I was shocked when I started getting those invites,” she said. “I tried to go to every single thing, because I was like, ‘Wow, what a great opportunity. This is unreal.’”
The restaurants shown on her page are split fairly evenly between meals she pays for herself and meals that are hosted (comped), and she doesn’t charge restaurants unless they’re part of a bigger chain, she said. If a restaurant requires deliverables, such as a specific type of content in exchange for free food, Tong said she will decline collaborating.
She said that influencers play a “crucial role” in the restaurant industry, explaining they “help get the word out about restaurants” and serve as a new way of advertising.
Novi Mitchell, creator of @booziebrunch (which has 177,000 followers on Instagram and 40,000 on TikTok), also believes influencers have a “significant impact” on the restaurant industry. Mitchell, who works full time in tech, said she also declines deliverable-dependent collabs.
“Integrity is everything in this space. I think transparency is a lot also in this space,” she said. “I think that restaurants and influencers should really work to find a way to work together, because influencers can be a form of marketing. But also influencers need to be very careful with just saying, ‘Everything’s good.’”
Mitchell started her food page in 2020 to showcase delicious restaurants and fun activities in the Bay Area. She said about 80% of meals featured on her page are ones she sought out and paid for herself, and about 20% of restaurants comped her meals or paid her. While she uses the “paid collaboration” function on Instagram for those that were paid, she’s also paid for food and had restaurants pay her after posting about it.
Mountain View resident Tina Lopez, whose account @tinalafoodie has over 14,000 followers on TikTok and 3,000 on Instagram, said she uses the phrase, “Thank you for having me” or “Thank you for this meal” in her captions to indicate the meal was comped (about 20% of her posts feature comped meals, she said.)
Lopez, who works full time in case management, started her Instagram in 2019 as a photo diary of what she was eating. Two years into the pandemic, she launched her TikTok.
If a meal is comped, she tries to keep the tone of the video more neutral and focused on letting people know that there’s a restaurant serving a specific type of cuisine in a specific city, she said. If the meal is terrible, she will let the restaurant know about her concerns and not post about it.
It can be difficult balancing honesty with not ruining someone’s business, said Carolyn Jung, a former food journalist at the San Jose Mercury News who now oversees the blog Food Gal. Jung explained that the difference between a food writer and an influencer is that journalists are expected to maintain a standard of fairness and ethics.
“Are you paying for your meals? Are you leaving a tip? Are you just writing what you’re writing, posting what you’re posting, just to get likes, or are you trying to be informative in an engaging but also truthful and enlightening way?” she said.
While she no longer works at a news publication, she said she still follows the same standard of ethics: disclose if she was invited in as a guest of the restaurant, never solicit restaurants for free meals and leave tips on comped meals. If the business is owned by a huge restaurant group and the meal is bad, she’ll write that it’s bad. If it’s a small mom-and-pop restaurant and the meal was terrible, she’ll opt to just not write about it.
“Because maybe they had a bad day, they had a bad week … they’re not able to withstand a review like that that would be so negative, whereas a bigger, splashier restaurant, where people are already anticipating and wanting to go there and really wondering about, ‘Oh wow, this place is coming and is it going to be any good?’ (could),” she said.
Jung said that influencers have definitely attracted people to a number of restaurants that otherwise may not have visited, but from the consumer perspective, the sheer amount of influencer content available creates a lot of noise.
“You see all these posts, and it’s hard to discern: Is this really something worthwhile, or is this just someone getting in on a trend and trying to popularize their own site because of it?” she said.
Inside the industry
Omakase restaurateur Sunny Noah, who owns Iki Omakase in Palo Alto and Ren Omakase in Menlo Park and works with Sushi Kinsen in Redwood City, often receives DMs on his restaurants’ Instagram accounts from influencers asking to collaborate.
While he can’t accept all the requests, he is more likely to agree to collabs when the restaurant is new. He sees it as a tactic to spread the word about its opening, but not a long-term marketing strategy. During the soft opening of Sushi Kinsen, he accepted a variety of influencer collabs, comping influencers’ meals because reservations weren’t completely full and it allowed for more opportunity to train staff.
“Later, when we get more booked, we would like to just focus on our regular customers instead of the influencers,” he said. “So I don’t know about the effects of influencers and the business aspect that they will bring for us, but definitely it helps (to get) a little exposure.”
Noah said he tries to share technical insights with influencers and thinks of these collaborations as educational experiences, but that these insights rarely make it into the videos posted to social media. He also uses collaborations as a way to get feedback, asking influencers for honest critiques.
“But they’re just so nice. They always say, ‘It’s really good,’” he said.
Yong Wu, owner of Redwood City’s Sushi Ai, also said that influencers were useful for promoting his restaurant when it opened, but he doesn’t plan on working with them regularly.
Wu explained that Sushi Ai created an influencer policy – those with at least 25,000 social media followers can get a fully comped meal, but ones with a smaller following get 50% off the final bill. He said he’s had influencers request to bring upwards of six friends with them, which he’s denied.
Wu said the effectiveness of these collabs has been mixed, but he thinks influencer partnerships are more likely to help restaurants with a distinctively unique quality about them. For example, his restaurant specializes in dry aging, which creates a hook for influencers to promote.
Franco Campilongo, owner of Italian restaurants Terún, iTalico and Impasto, noted that influencer collabs appear to be more effective if there’s something that differentiates your business from other restaurants, such as an upcoming event.
Campilongo recently started using mustard.love, a platform where influencers apply for collaborations with business owners and share profiles that business owners can view. The platform has tiers of compensation that the restaurant sets. For Campilongo’s restaurants, influencers with 2,000-10,000 followers can receive $150 worth of free food, while those with more than 50,000 followers can get that same food credit plus $200 in cash in exchange for a social media post.
“It’s increasingly important to be on social media now,” Campilongo said. “Most of the people choose their place to go (eat) through social media.”
While all of his influencer collaborations have been positive experiences, he said the downside is you can’t calculate the rate of return unless you provide a promo code with influencers’ posts.
“I think that (influencers) are not vital, but very important to the growth of the business for now,” Campilongo said.
Still, other Peninsula restaurants have never used food influencers, including 45-year-old Flea Street in Menlo Park.
“I would say I’m curious about this trend and would never close a door to it, but I’m still an old storyteller,” said owner Jesse Cool.
She cautioned that influencer marketing might not achieve long-term results, comparing it to incentivizing guests to give five-star reviews on Google or Yelp. It might bring in customers one time, but they won’t return if reality doesn’t meet expectations.
“I would think even a new business would want to be just astute at understanding who that influencer is reaching,” she said. “Because if you bring in the wrong clientele, it can be really hard on the business and the staff, and maybe not very long-lived.”
Cool said she’s never even hired a PR firm to help with marketing, explaining that she runs the social media accounts and writes the email newsletters herself for an extra personal touch. She attributes her hands-on approach to part of her restaurant’s long-term success.
“If something’s not quite right, then take the pulse and listen and figure out what it is the community is asking for and change it,” she said. “Talk to your customers, listen, read the reviews, be willing to pivot, adapt, and you’ll become more successful than if you just hire somebody to do a video.”
Potential for deception
Media law expert Christopher Terry agreed influencers are an effective marketing tool for restaurants, but he warned that working with them may cause more harm than good.
If an influencer receives any material connection – a free meal, complimentary breadsticks or even a 1% discount – they must disclose it following the FTC’s 2023 endorsement guidelines, he said. If they don’t, he said, it’s a deceptive act that could result in a fine of $44,100 for every person who sees the post times the number of days that it’s up. Deceptive acts are not protected by the First Amendment, Terry said.
The FTC updates its endorsement guidelines every 10 years, but the pandemic delayed the 2020 release by three years. The 2023 guidelines are the first that specifically talk about influencers and state that influencers must superimpose a disclosure on top of images and videos and that it must be visible and contrastable. Hyperlinking to the disclosure or thanking the restaurant is not enough, he said.
“They have to be fairly obtrusive disclosures,” Terry said. “It used to be if you had an Instagram post, even if it was a video, as long as you had #paid or #theygavemeafreemeal or something like that, that was enough. It’s not anymore. It has to be clear and conspicuous.”
Disclosures also have to be in throwback posts. If an influencer posted about a hosted meal on Wednesday and again about the same meal a week later, the newest post still must have the disclosure.
Even if an influencer doesn’t share anything positive about the restaurant, just posting about it is considered an endorsement by the FTC and must follow these guidelines.
“Most people do not understand that influencers are functionally paid shills,” Terry said. “I can look at an influencer post and know that it’s basically an ad, but a lot of regular people do not recognize influencer content that way. That makes it far more insidious, and that’s why the FTC has really moved forward on these rules.”
Because the FTC has typically enforced influencer policies with people employing and managing influencers and not with the influencers themselves, the risk for an exorbitant fine falls on the restaurants. Even if a restaurant is partnering with a third party to manage the influencers (such as mustard.love), the restaurant is still responsible, Terry said.
So how can restaurants ensure law-abiding collabs? Terry recommended using contracts.
“You have a deal with the influencer that tells them that they have certain obligations to meet the disclosure guidelines; otherwise, they don’t get paid,” Terry said.
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Very interesting!!! Thanks for this uniquely informative articl.
“Paid shills” indeed.
I saw internet public restaurant discussion start. From food Newsgroups throughout the ’80s, to the early-hypertext Bay Area Restaurant Guide, BARG (1993, with counterparts for Chicago and NYC) to Chowhound, the first to get high-profile media notice (Bay Area residents had access to the internet from middle 1980s, but most didn’t know it for another decade). Through Chowhound-influenced fora such as eGullet; and by the ’00s, Yelp (which repeated BARG’s basic format from a decade earlier and made it more commercial).
Yelp officially bans paid or comped “reviews,” though in my experience that’s not seriously enforced.
What readers would knowingly take seriously an “influencer” whose good word is for sale as cheaply as a few dollars (or even just a free dessert)?
I’ve recorded (occasionally publishing or online-posting) restaurant experiences for about 45 years, seldom even accepting any freebies, let alone payment, which always undermines a report’s integrity. 30 years ago, that principle even led to a standoff at a great restaurant, where chef and manager, maybe taking me as a “shopper” for a serious publication (no social-media “influencers” then), refused to let me pay for a “tasting” meal, but I refused to leave without paying my own way. (Eventually we split the difference.)