A food entrepreneur success story to inspire you to create an amazing food business for the long term.
RECIPE FOR SUCCESS INGREDIENT CARD
Ingredient: Cook for Cash-Ideas
Question:
Do you have a food entrepreneur success story?
Answer:
Aussie food darling Marion Grasby first made a name for herself as an audience fave on season two of Masterchef Australia, with her Thai-inspired dishes that had judges and audiences raving – and craving. Despite missing out on the 2010 crown, she took advantage of her instant popularity to combine the two loves of her life – cooking and creativity – into a global food empire that has seen her star keep rising.
Marion is now an accomplished cookbook author and entrepreneur who broadcasts her cooking tips and recipes to millions of eager foodies via her digital publishing network.
She joined editors Adam Bub and Cec Busby on the First Act podcast to share her journey from her Thai mum’s cosy kitchen to one of the most well-known faces on the Australian food scene.
“My food hero”
Marion credits her passion for home-cooked food to her mum and the traditional Thai cuisine she loves to cook.
Marion recalls, “You can learn whatever you can in professional kitchens and culinary schools, but I adore the fact that I have all these secret Asian mum techniques that I learned organically. Places and people and my family, friends, and the people I love are all experienced through food and food moments, so for me, food is a very special thing. Not just something I have for dinner; food creates memories, love, and relationships.”
Marion Grasby, founder of Marion’s Kitchen
Despite her foodie upbringing, it took Marion some time to figure out her path in life, studying law and journalism at university before scoring a job as a journalist at the ABC in Adelaide.
“To be honest, I wasn’t an outstanding journalist, so it’s probably good that I found a new career path,” she laughs. “South Australia is an amazing place, with so many great food and wine producers, and all of a sudden, being a serious journalist didn’t seem so appealing. So I walked into my editor’s office at the ABC and said, ‘I’m quitting; I’m going to study a Master in Gastronomy’. I was doing that when I decided to hop on that little show called Masterchef, and off we went from there.”
Bootstrapping for success vs five minutes of fame
While Marion is grateful for the springboard to fame that ‘little show’ presented, she admits that the success she now enjoys has come from plenty of hard work, passion, and a willingness to do things differently. Marion and her husband Tim mortgaged their house and borrowed money from the family to bootstrap the first Marion’s Kitchen supermarket product lines.
“A lot of people don’t take you seriously because you have been on a reality show, so I was keen to stand on my own two legs and do my own thing,” Marion admits. “Coming off the show, a lot of people said, ‘Why would you make it yourself and mortgage your house when you could ride the coattails of that five minutes of fame? It would be so much easier to be a head on a product, go and endorse something.’ But that wasn’t appealing to me at all. What I wanted to do was build something amazing for the long term.
“I remember how exciting it was to be creating a company and becoming a food entrepreneur; having the guts to get on a plane and go to Thailand with my recipes and knock on the door of big manufacturing facilities and producers. Looking back now, I was naive but determined, and we had a product on shelves in a major supermarket in Australia within eight months of coming off the show.
“It was a sense of urgency more than anything,” Marion reveals. “I was like, ‘This is my time; if I don’t do this now, when am I gonna do it?’ We were determined to make this on our own and to build it from the ground up. That required some gut-wrenching risk-taking, and we were very lucky.”
Building a digital empire
With the initial success of her Marion’s Kitchen supermarket lines, Marion quickly realised she had to think outside the box to compete with more prominent food brands that could afford expensive TV ad campaigns to reach their audience. By 2017, Marion saw she had a chance to embrace a niche the bigger brands weren’t yet entertaining – social media.
“When you are small and competing with the big guys, you have to figure out how you can be nimble because agility is basically all you’ve got,” says Marion. “YouTube is the OG of social media platforms, and those hands-only cooking videos became a thing. Social media was not big at all at the time – Instagram wasn’t a thing, and Facebook was still a place where you just popped up a sentence about where you’d been. Suddenly, we could see a great way to market our products in a way different from what all the other big companies were doing. This was when social media for brands and companies started to kick off.
“I soon realised that we got more engagement when I stuck my head in front of the camera. So we pivoted and turned the boardroom into a makeshift kitchen studio, employed a couple of video photography university graduates, and started making videos. The first few were a bit disappointing,” Marion laughs. “I think my mum and a couple of other people watched them. But pretty soon, we were getting 10,000 views and then hundred thousand views, and followers on top of followers. We currently have more than six million followers over all channels, and we reach 45 or 50 million people monthly.”
Surprising learnings from social strategy
Undoubtedly, the age of social media is also the age of instant feedback, which can be notoriously tricky for brands. Marion and her team have embraced the concept wholeheartedly, using insights from their audience to create videos that engage and delight their followers and fans. Some learnings have been amusing, others fascinating – but all of them have been helpful, Marion admits.
“There are so many algorithms, and it’s easy to get caught up in it, but my philosophy is very simple – I need to make content that my audience wants to watch, and the algorithm simply takes what people like and feeds it back to them. So, it’s all about finding your people, being authentic and genuine, and creating content you love and know your audience will love. I know that all sounds very simple, but it kind of is. We invested very heavily in that, and that’s where we find ourselves today.
“It’s a challenge, but what I love about social media is that you get told directly if you’re on the right track or not. The algorithm is just another word for the audience – they tell you what they want with what they watch and engage with. A small, amusing example is that our audience loves it when I’m wearing a white dress because I cook a lot of spicy things – the jeopardy, the danger, and the things splashing around – that seem to keep people engaged.
“A bigger example is that last year, we decided to self-publish our cookbooks. I’ve published cookbooks with publishers before, but we’re constantly looking at ways we can break down the traditional barriers of business or business models. So, we self-published the cookbook and sold 40,000 copies within eight months – and it’s only available through my social channels and website; it’s not at Big W or Amazon. That, to me, was a watershed moment for what we’ve been doing in media publishing – it’s amazing to feel that level of support, that people are willing to invest in you. Since then, we’ve published our second cookbook, which has just sold out in Australia, and we’re about to publish a third early next year.
“This is what is wonderful about the power of digital content – how you can build something so big and amazing without having those traditional roadblocks in your way. No TV producer is saying I have to be like this or be like that; I don’t have to ask someone to green-light a piece of content I want to make. What I love about social content is that you’re directly engaging with people; it’s not a passive experience like traditional media.
“Our company started as a food product company – we’re now a media publishing company. It’s all about knowing what my audience wants and then making it. I’m constantly in awe at what you can do.”
(Source: Koshies Business Builders September 22, 2022. “Agility is all you’ve got”: How Marion Grasby grew from Masterchef hopeful to global food queen).
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