Creating Scroll-Stopping Food Content & Building Community with Courtnee Futch

 In this episode, we sit down with the talented Courtnee Futch, a chef, mixologist, cookbook author, and culinary producer. Courtnee shares her unique approach to creating food content that engages the senses and inspires her audience to get in the kitchen and cook.

Courtnee discusses her passion for making fancy, approachable food and the importance of simplifying what's shown on camera to make it accessible to home cooks. She also delves into her love for building community and fostering genuine connections with her followers through storytelling. 

Aliza and Courtnee also explore the challenges faced by women in the influencer industry, including the pay gap and the need for more transparent conversations about compensation. Courtnee also shares her exciting plans for the future, including the launch of her culinary creative production house, The Maillard, which aims to support brands with their culinary content needs and develop talented creators in the food space.

Episode Highlights

00:00 Chef Courtney Futch: cookbook author and influencer.

04:04 Elevate flavors of everyday foods with simple ingredients 

06:50 Enjoying beautiful food detail shots, empowering followers.

12:44 Micro niche allows dual relatability, balancing identity.

17:35 Equity encompasses race, gender, numbers, and talent.

22:24 Empowering mentorship can lead to remarkable content creation.

23:12 Connecting talent with brands for mutual benefit.

Links and Resources

Connect with Courtnee;
https://www.courtneefutch.com/
https://courtneefutch.my.canva.site/media#contact-me
https://www.instagram.com/courtneefutch

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

I want people to feel like they wish they could come through the screen and smell the food, but I also think that there is something to really simplifying what you're showing on camera. I think that I make fancy, approachable food and I like for the content to feel elevated, yet approachable. I want it to be a scroll stopper.

Speaker 2 0:32

Welcome back to the she Speaks Influence Effect podcast. I am so excited to have you hear my conversation with Courtney Futch. She is a chef, a mixologist, a cookbook author and a culinary producer for food media, and she started baking at the age of eight. She joined a high school culinary team and founded Thunder Cakes Bakery during her freshman year in college. She's a career chef, but she thinks about her content as something that somebody can do as a home cook and I love that. It's very accessible her content.

Speaker 2 1:06

I warn you you're going to want to make everything. Courtney has built this amazing community and she takes so much care in how she engages and talks to her community, answers their questions and really has this sense for what she is doing not just to push out content and to show these amazing dishes, but really make a connection with her audience. I love Courtney's approach. She talks about how she thinks about building community. She also talks about food and how she thinks about it in everything, in terms of all of her content and the offshoots of what she does. I really enjoyed this conversation with Courtney. I think you will as well. We're going to jump right into it. Here we go, courtney, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1 2:01

Hi, thank you. Thank you so much, I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 2 2:04

Well, I am excited to have you Right before. We hopped on and I started looking at some of your content and it's delicious looking all of it. I think that there are creators who understand how to make whatever the product is. Whatever it is that the content that you're creating. In your case, you do a lot of recipe content. You do other content as well, but you do recipe content. Understanding how to make that content enticing for the audience is a skill that is not easy to come by. So I want to ask you how do you think about that? Is it just, is it just innate? Do you know how to make something look delicious to the people who are watching your content? Can you talk a little bit about how you think about the creation of the content?

Speaker 1 2:59

Yeah, so one thank you. I feel like the best compliment that anybody can give me is that the food looks like it would be delicious, and I think that a large part of my approach has to do with engaging the senses. Like people use the word sensual and I think that they apply other connotations to it. I love that word for a number of contexts, but the primary one being, like, the engagement of other people's senses. I want people to feel like they wish they could come through the screen and smell the food, but I also think that there is something to really kind of simplifying what you're showing on camera. I love an editing trick, I love them, but that's not necessarily the style that I think really keeps people in it with me. I think that I make fancy, approachable food and I like for the content to feel elevated yet approachable.

Speaker 1 3:51

I just did a post of some summer roasted cherries which I thought were so pretty and I just sat them over in like the natural light in my window, and you know, cherries are a pretty simple concept. I think most people know what cherries are, how they taste, but the idea of elevating them by roasting them with a little bit of maple syrup or honey and vanilla. Adding a little bit of sea salt and some black pepper really allows people to understand that there are fun ways to play with flavor. I have a specific passion for home cooking and so when we're thinking about what people are doing in their homes is they're saving inspo and they're never returning to it. They're never returning to it until they have a special occasion or they're a little bit bored or you know they've got something coming up and they want to surprise somebody else in their life and I like the idea of people feeling like there are little spectacular moments for them in their day. I want it to be like a scroll stopper and I want it again like a scroll stopper and I want it again to feel approachable.

Speaker 1 4:48

If I'm layering on too many ingredients, the likelihood that somebody ever goes and creates it very, very low. The likelihood that they save it high, but I never hear back about like if they've made it or not, and to me that feels like a failure right. Like I want to know that you've felt inspired to the point of trial and I think that that's kind of just been like the through line in my career is inspiring trial, and then when I get to layer in brands that I really enjoy and get to encourage people to try those too, then that means like I get to do more of the thing that I love Just in the day to day, like I want to encourage everybody to kind of like play with their own senses when they're at home. That's touch, that's taste, that's smell, you know all of the things sight and have a little bit of fun with it. I think we should all be playing with our food more, and I think for me, my content does its best when it's an equal mix of playful and slow.

Speaker 1 5:38

I think me and the quick, the like, the super quick editing styles. There are so many creators who I follow, who I adore, who do their videos in under like 30 seconds and it's like a whole recipe in under 30 seconds. I feel like I want to show everybody like here are all of the steps, I don't want to miss anything. So I will frequently have 90 second videos. Just recently I started doing smaller bites but, like my best performing videos are all like 60 to 90 seconds and they're not recipe to recipe, like they're never instructional, they are storytelling, and I'm talking about either the way that a food item has made me feel or I'm talking about the way that it has shown up in my, in my romance like life or my romance with myself or any of those other things, and I think those things make already aspirational food feel more attainable, because now the message kind of lands with folks in a different way.

Speaker 1 6:33

So even when I'm not layering my voice over things and I'm trying something new right now, where I'm just not putting my voice on stuff and I'm just doing little clips, little B-roll clips of things that I'm making and not really showing a step by step because it's not a tutorial, but the recipe is available if you want it.

Speaker 1 6:50

I'm having a lot more fun with that right now. It's just beautiful detail shots of food. One of my followers actually just tagged me. She remade the coconut cake from three weeks ago and that made me so happy to see like she toasted the coconut, like I got to watch her do it in her story and I just really enjoyed, I think, that piece. So I think when you start to like break it down, take the sense of like oh, here's what I want for them to get out of this and think about what they're actually getting out of it. They just kind of want to have a general idea of how to make the thing and then feel empowered to go and do it themselves. So that's a lot of my new approach these days.

Speaker 2 7:27

I think one of the things that your content does really well and I want to ask you how intentional this is or, again, just kind of innate. It's clear that you are cultivating a community of people who definitely come to you because they're interested in seeing this. You know this career chef, doing home cooking because it makes it so much more like, relatable. As somebody who is not great in the kitchen, but I see you like, it's obvious to me that when I look at your content that you know how to cook things that I wouldn't have any clue how to do, but you make me feel like I could try to recreate it by myself. Right, and and and. So as part of that process, though, you also pepper in personal stories. Right, you talk about there's.

Speaker 2 8:20

You have a series of content where you talk about your relationship with your fiance, but you had a terrific sponsorship, a paid sponsorship with a company that helped you create the ring I believe. I watched it and I thought this makes so much sense to me that you would create a video to show your personalized story of how you partnered with this company, and I completely saw it as very consistent with everything else in your feed, even though it had nothing to do with food, and I think that is the genius of creators like you that you're able to take your theme, which is, let's say, by and large, around food and drink, that you can weave into it your story, your personal story, and talk about topics like romance, talk about relationship with yourself, with your second other, and therefore a sponsorship, a collaboration with a ring company makes absolute sense. How do you think about that?

Speaker 1 9:34

That is such a great question. So I feel like I am two things and I am a creative first and I'm a chef immediately after, and so the creative piece I think shows up in like my writing. Like I don't often call myself a writer, but I am one and I really love that as kind of a through line. And I was scrolling through I don't know where I was, it must've been Pinterest or maybe I saw it somewhere on Instagram and it's notes from Octavia Butler, who is a phenomenal, phenomenal author, and I one of the notes is like I am a world maker, world weaver, and I love the idea of like weaving worlds, like it. Just it really made a lot of sense to me. And when I'm thinking about what my world looks like as I'm weaving it up, I think love is an important through line, and the secondary through line is food, and I'd say food and drink kind of go together to me, because if I'm not having one, I'm likely having the other. And then I think the last piece of that is my love of language. So I, the way that I just like I love, I love words, and that also means like I'm great at yapping.

Speaker 1 10:42

So the way that I built up a lot of my community in the very early stages were that people knew me for my two food businesses, one of which was a catering company and the other one was my bakery, and I was just now kind of talking through how I make the food that they knew me for in a pre-pandemic era, and the pandemic, I think, kind of put a big shift on the way that I had to use language in order to connect with people. I was doing these little FaceTime consultations so you could book me. We'd do a little FaceTime for like 30 minutes. You show me what's in your fridge and I would shoot you over here are some ideas of things that you can cook with what's here. Because you remember, we were all in like that weird grocery crisis and so I was just very connected to the little bit of audience that I had at that time, which I think was maybe less than 5,000 folks.

Speaker 1 11:29

I was just like very plugged in to what people had going on. I would post what I was cooking throughout the day and like I'd make a little recap video of it and I'd share it on feed and these things were not like highly produced at all. It was actually very not in alignment with my work in production at that point in time. It was very scrappy. It was very just like I'm doing things at home, I'm cooking. If y'all wanna join me while I'm cooking, let's pass the time together, and I think that I just got really good at honing more of a community-based voice and also just taking a genuine interest in what other people are talking about and what they have going on.

Speaker 1 12:02

And then I realized what I was doing was community building. I felt like the community kind of just kept coming and I was saying things. The food was still the through line. I was talking about, like first date etiquette and you know, going out on dates with people and you know, here are some things you probably shouldn't order. You know things like that in a really interesting way. So I think that there's just a lot of trust in the space and where the flow has taken me. And then, once I knew enough about what the flow was doing, I was able to take the flow and kind of spin it back into myself Be helpful.

Speaker 1 12:32

Now, granted, not everybody as a creator gets that opportunity. Sometimes you can win and you have like a very clear niche, or you have a goal. Attach yourself to a niche that allows you to achieve that goal and I don't think that there's anything wrong with it. But if a micro niche starts to form up underneath that, I think, lean in, because now it allows you to relate to people in two ways and you lean more into one than the other. Like, if you ask any of my audience who I am at one point in time, they might've met me as the girl who was talking about like my relationship to love. And then there are other people and there are more of them, for sure who know me as a chef who talks about love at times, and that doesn't make a difference.

Speaker 1 13:12

But I don't want to shame the people who know me for my work in the relationship space. I had valued it because it's brought me a lot and it's brought me a lot of really great people. But now I have to figure out how to like straddle that line so that I don't lose one as I'm continuing to build. They're very invested in obtaining a sort of warmth in the community, and sometimes that also means not doing it when I don't have it to give. So I take long breaks from certain platforms If I need to just kind of like recalibrate instead of me showing up on camera. You'll get more cocktail videos, which is fun, and when I do that I feel like I'm in a better space and so I can create warm spaces for people online Not to be using a pun, but you have this recipe for success in terms of your blueprint for what you're doing right.

Speaker 2 14:03

You've built this community. It's so clear that you have an understanding of your community, not just for now. The fact that you've mentioned that you did a survey and 2000 people which is amazing responded to your survey. It's very clear that you have a sense for who they are. I think the really good creators who have a long runway ahead of them. They have that staying power. I have to ask you this because I am kind of astounded that we are in an industry that is dominated by women. There are like 80 something percent of all paid influencers are female or women, yet men tend to make more. They make like 30% more than the women do in this space.

Speaker 1 14:53

It upsets me deeply. So at a point in time when I was working for one of the largest meal kit companies and I was their influencer marketing manager and I was seeing like into the deals of the celebrities that we were partnering with and I felt like almost every single time the deals for male chefs in the space and we I'll equivalent this in a second to the influencer space too but, like male chefs were above and beyond asking for more and planning on delivering less, lower deliverables, higher fees, and that ended up being kind of like a consistent theme. There is an audacity gap that I think men feel empowered in the space to kind of come into that.

Speaker 1 15:28

Women do not, and I think that there's just a slightly different functioning. That's kind of happening One. There's inequity, I think, in this space too, but because of how dominated it is by women. I think one of my theories is that men are seen as more of a rare commodity in the influencing space, and I think that whoever's implicit biases about the authority that men have over their audience and their ability to convert those people into users is a different one than what we know, the kin keeping and community building that women do in our communal spaces, like no shade to the men love, men down.

Speaker 1 16:05

But I also am like, how is this happening? And I think it's happening inside of the companies and it's systemic. But there's also kind of like the more broad kind of sticky feeling that we as women have asking for what we know we're worth, and I don't think it's that we don't negotiate, I think we're really savvy. But I think also a lot of women in the space are not communicating transparently about the sort of money that we're making either. So then we all end up in a loop.

Speaker 2 16:30

So do you think that people are women aren't communicating honestly about what they're making? Are they under reporting it or over reporting?

Speaker 1 16:38

I feel like it depends on the space that you're in. So, like in the world of food, I feel like I have seen numbers that feel really inflated for what the deliverables are. But when you think about the cooking that you have to do, when you think about the filming that you're doing, the editing that you're doing, the recipes that you're inevitably writing, the food space is different in that way, because the other piece, the quiet piece of the content is you know it's this recipe writing and developing, food styling and whatnot. So when you're considering all of the other additional costs, that final number is actually a very kind of misleading number. Even if it is not. It could be all encompassing, but it's rare that people are talking about everything that goes into how they're getting it done.

Speaker 2 17:20

That's the part that I think we need to, as an industry, get better at explaining the pieces of the value from influencer and then why you're charging what you're charging.

Speaker 1 17:35

Exactly Because there's no standardization.

Speaker 1 17:38

And when I talk about equity, I think people often assume that like I'm meaning race and gender and all the things.

Speaker 1 17:43

I think that's always kind of in the background.

Speaker 1 17:45

That is important to me, but there's also a numbers equity game and sometimes you've got really talented creators who do not know if influencing at a high level is like what they want to do, and not having the follower count is keeping them out of a lot of the conversations in order for them to be talent. So how do we get over there? Like what does that look like? And so I think like more honest conversations about how we collaborate and also I will say this as somebody who's been in house on the creative team we have to be less territorial about what good content means and can look like. We tend to be very protective, so we're holding on to like the brand image. We're responsible for it, it's in our KPIs, it's in like every facet of the work, but sometimes we're also sticklers in ways that are just unhelpful and allowing other people to share their vision and collaborate with us and kind of treat them like freelancers or, you know, or contractors for however long and be a part of the briefing process, where do you?

Speaker 2 18:47

where do you want this to be for yourself in the next, let's say, two years? I know that it's happening just so quickly, but where do you see yourself in the next, over the course of the next 24 months?

Speaker 1 18:58

I feel like two years is very attainable. I think the pandemic kind of shifted. A lot of my relationship to this was gathering people. I am, I think, at the very core of who I am like a gatherer, I'm a facilitator, I love to connect people and I want them to connect largely over food or a drink or an experience or something. And I see myself doing a great deal more of that, I think, when I'm looking at my personal brand, and so I kind of see personal and professional as like two different jams here. So I'll start with personal first. I'd be totally fine if my platform size didn't grow, because I love where we're at. This is a great community. They're bought in, they're invested I'm like fully monetized. They purchase and also brands buy in.

Speaker 1 19:46

Something that I think I've noticed over the last couple of years is just there feels like there's a lack of community. My fiance and I do a thing called office hours. It's like one of my favorites. It has nothing to do with business really at all, but it is like an intimate dinner party. We get 10 people together, including the two of us, and we never invite the same people twice until we've done like three of the rotations and then folks can come back and it's a mix of folks in the creative world, folks in business, folks in finance, folks in tech. We get to know each other and we talk about what we need and we don't get up from the table until one person at least has had one of their problems solved. So I want to be doing a lot more of that. If the audience size overall grows and that's great or if I'm just fostering more connectivity within the audience that we have right now, then that is also great. I want to be working a lot more deeply with brands, which is something that I haven't. I've prioritized and also haven't, but it's not something that I've done a lot of like pitching for and whatnot, and I would like to be doing more of because I think it keeps me sharp as a creative and also as a marketer For the professional piece.

Speaker 1 20:45

I'm building something and it's very scary to me right now, but it's called the Maillard and it is a culinary creative production house, so you can call it a culinary creative agency, but I think the emphasis really is on production in two major ways. So one of those ways is working with brands to execute on their culinary content needs. So they could be like a true, like trying true food brand could be, a beverage brand could be, or just a brand in the fashion space that wants to do some cool culinary things. Food is pervasive, it's everywhere, and creating from original creative concepting all the way through post some really beautiful original content for them, and it could be editorial. It could be branded. The goal could be to turn it into commercials Doesn't really matter. But for all of the work that I've done in the creative space and as a marketer and in production and as a chef creative space and as a marketer and in production and as a chef, I feel like that is really where I house all of my skillset and I think that that is just really fun. But then the flip side of that and it's the piece that I'm really, really passionate about, I would like to move it forward is talent development. I love working with creators, creatives, chefs, culinarians, food photographers, whatever and helping them think through the strategy of one, how they consistently build business, and then two, getting them comfortable in front of the camera.

Speaker 1 22:07

I think there are so many people who, like I, had a coaching client earlier this year who wanted to start a mixology page in honor of her daughter and such an incredible story. Like I just I genuinely love her so much. Every time we'd finish a session we'd just cry, like that was. That was our sort of caring one. But the confidence gap that we were able to fill during that time, so that she felt like she could approach this content and not feel like an imposter, was huge, and so being in it with her for the this is how you develop the content. This is how you think through a great concepting idea. This is the best way to gather things for your mood board, and here's how you inspire yourself in a productive way so that you don't feel envy. And here's how you start to feel comfortable in front of the camera. And we I brought her down to Atlanta and we did it here at my home and we did like coaching sessions and I spent the full day with her and we created like five or six videos together. And now she's back home and she lives in Jersey also, but she's back home and now she's creating content on her own again and you can see the remarkable difference because she feels empowered to be able to do that.

Speaker 1 23:12

But I think that where I see the talent piece going is that I am building up a roster of phenomenal talent and also having them work with brands as well. So what I was saying the thing earlier about like how we get brands into more collaborative relationships with influencers and talent that's part of it. So now you can hire this talent and have them evangelize your brand, but inside of your content flow and I can film it or y'all can film it, it really doesn't matter to me but we're able to pay them at a rate that is transparent. That talent fee is just, it is what it is right, and so it has nothing to do with the number of followers that they have or whatever. It's about their skill, and I think that that's one of the ways that I really envision like just kind of leveling the playing field Also for Black and Brown and women creators.

Speaker 1 24:02

I think that that confidence gap I call it the audacity gap that's what I feel like I've been kind of struggling with is like I just want to be more audacious, to feel like they have audacity but also transparency and a clear roadmap of the sort of money that they could be making. I think it helps fill the gap much more quickly and maybe more effectively and inspires a whole new creation of, or generation of of creators who feel empowered to just like go and get it. So that's that's what I see for myself like in the next two years. Like my art, I launched it in a month and a half publicly. It's been insane to like already have my first two clients while I've been quietly building this thing. More of that coming and working with more brands and working with more talent and just creating really fun experiences for people, whether it is like digitally or in real life.

Speaker 2 24:56

Oh wow, I love that. Well, Courtney, I am so grateful that you've spent this time with us today. If people want to follow you and learn more about what you're doing and hopefully hear more about the launch of your culinary creative agency, what is the best way for them to do that?

Speaker 1 25:13

Yes, so the best place right now to keep in touch with everything that I'm doing is by following me on Instagram, which is at Courtney Futch, and that's Courtney with two E's, and you could also stay abreast of all things that are coming with the MyYard and sign up for the newsletter through CourtneyFutchcom. So the MyYard website is being built currently and will drop in the month of August, so I'm not sure when this episode will be out, but it might very well be out by then, and if it is, then you can go to myartcreativecom.

Speaker 2 25:41

Well, thank you so much. I am so grateful for this time that you spent with us and I cannot wait to see where all of this goes for you. Thank you so much, aliza, I appreciate it.