Sushi vs. Sushi, Donut vs. Donut: Why Is This Food Show Such a Hit?

Food videos are far more fun than they are useful — which is a big part of why they took off on social media.

Buzzfeed, the new-media outlet that made its name with listicles and quizzes, is these days getting almost all of its buzz from a single food show.

Worth It first landed on YouTube last September. Its debut episode, "$3 Sushi vs. $250 Sushi," hit 1 million views within days. The number soon climbed to 10 million, and has now passed 20 million. Since then, view counts in the tens of millions have become normal for the show.

The third season premiered on August 27. Each season runs ten episodes, and this season's destinations include Sydney, Australia. The opener compares prices for mac and cheese; four days after it aired, it was closing in on 4 million views.

Host Steven Lim probably never saw this coming. He switched careers to join Buzzfeed only two or three years ago, and the format he came up with isn't complicated: each episode sends him to three restaurants — high-end, mid-range, and cheap (mostly in the United States for the first two seasons) — serving the same kind of food, and he and a co-host pick the best value for viewers.

The foods they've tried include a $1 plain donut against a $100 gold-leaf donut, a $27 cream cake against a $1,120 custom showstopper, an $11 ordinary steak against $306 Kobe beef...

But Worth It has genuinely reached a certain kind of viewer, and its tone is warm and gentle. Even with a $1 taco, Steven Lim and his co-hosts dig in with real delight and never hold back the praise, and the camera keeps catching the two hosts with their mouths full, eyes wide, licking their lips. When they eat the expensive stuff, they remember to box up the leftovers and bring them back to the Buzzfeed office to share with colleagues. The plain, honest pleasure the three of them take in eating is what viewers feel too.

Beyond the eating, the rapport between Steven Lim and Andrew Ilnyckyj — who took over from the first episode's other host in season one, episode three — and even their back-and-forth with cameraman Adam Bianchi has become part of the appeal. Every time the three-man "tasting squad" goes out to raid a restaurant, each of them shows a sharp personality of his own: fans call Steven "talkative and outgoing" and Andrew "shy on the outside, soft on the inside," while Adam, who tags along and grabs a few bites between takes, always wears the dazed look of someone thinking, "Why am I here? Oh, whatever... thank god for the free food."

On the drives between restaurants, with Steven at the wheel, the three also hand out food trivia: chefs massage an octopus for more than 20 minutes to keep it tender, say, or the "pizza principle" — experts have found that a slice of pizza in New York costs about the same as a subway ride.

The show has no obvious gimmick; what it is good at is digging out the variety inside everyday life. Start with the hosts' own backgrounds, which give it a touch of the foreign. Steven Lim is a thin Chinese American with light, straight, short hair. Out of college he joined Procter & Gamble, inspecting the factories that made Tide detergent, but he didn't want to spend the rest of his life making soap, so he began shooting videos at home on his iPhone about his life as a Chinese American. One of them, on how Asian parents react when their children say "I love you," drew 2 million views in its first week online. Buzzfeed offered him a job soon after, and Worth It was his idea.

The restaurants the two hosts choose are often run by immigrants: a Cuban immigrant baking cakes, a Chinese immigrant running a Western restaurant. For an episode on Korean barbecue, they brought in a Korean American guest to taste alongside them and explain Korean food traditions to viewers. In a ten-minute episode, a good stretch of the footage goes to the stories of the owners and the cooks, making the point that cheap or expensive, someone's passion and hard work went into the food.

All these personalities turn the show into something close to a food reality series. Viewers take Worth It as light entertainment — they come for the tasting squad's hunt, not for an authoritative verdict.

And in fact, at the end of every episode the hosts just each name the restaurant they personally think is the best value. They don't hand out stars the way a Michelin inspector would, weighing ingredients, technique, flavor, and originality.

Still, the show's popularity ends up making the restaurants on it famous. Steven Lim has said that one fan told him he had eaten his way through every restaurant in the steak episode, and that Pasta Sisters — the cheapest pasta place, which both hosts called "worth it" — now opens at 11:30 a.m. and has sold out of pasta by 2 p.m.

Worth It keeps trying new things. Episodes originally ran 7 to 8 minutes, on the theory that people in a fast-food age have no patience for long video. But the response was good enough that the producers grew bolder: season two stretched to 12 or 13 minutes an episode, and viewership held. Seventy-five percent of viewers still watch an episode through to the end.

Steven Lim wants to find the limit of how long an audience will stay. His latest target is 23 minutes an episode — about the length of a TV episode, which does look like a gamble. But Buzzfeed says that in a Google consumer survey it ran in June, 60% of respondents said that if new episodes aired at a fixed time every week, they would largely keep watching.

That big fan base gives the show the confidence to widen its subject matter. Worth It has already added non-food comparisons: an $80 tattoo against an $875 one, a $50 hotel room against a $35,000-a-night suite. Steven Lim says the ideas come from viewer comments. Fans have asked to see all sorts of odd things compared — haunted houses, for one — and the show may get to them. Further out, Steven Lim wants to make custom episodes for audiences in other countries.

Steven Lim has said the show's secret weapon is Buzzfeed's database. He pulled the popular elements out of it — food, going places with friends, taste tests, price comparisons — and built them into the show, which is why it worked. Most of the food shows drawing crowds right now are still mukbang eating marathons, novelty theme food, or big-budget cooking contests, and even the food-hunting shows tend to hook viewers with strange dishes from unfamiliar cultures. Very few, like Worth It, build episodes out of ordinary food.

Some have noted that everything the show compares is high-calorie, high-fat guilty food, but that doesn't stop most people from feeling the happiness of eating it. Hot dogs, pizza, cake — food you can reach out and grab anywhere in America — make it easy to recognize yourself in what's on screen, and comparing prices is something nobody eating out can avoid. It all sits very close to real life.

Buzzfeed says that in the most recent quarter Worth It ranked in the top five among its shows for 18-to-34-year-olds, and still made the top ten among 18-to-49-year-olds. The show's core audience is Buzzfeed's own: social-media-dependent millennials. Of Buzzfeed's more than 200 million users, 50% are young people aged 18 to 34.

Buzzfeed, founded in 2006, gets labeled with words like "viral" and "native advertising"; listicles, quizzes, and short videos are what it is known for. Last year the company said it would split itself into two separate divisions, one for news and one for entertainment, with the second concentrating on video.

Last year NBCUniversal, a unit of Comcast Corp., put another $200 million into Buzzfeed, bringing its total to $400 million and making it the largest investor. Buzzfeed is valued at $1.7 billion, and founder Jonah Peretti has 2018 in mind for an IPO. The company expects revenue of $350 million this year, 35% more than in 2016, and its goal is for TV shows and film projects to bring in a third of revenue within a few years.

Food video will be central to that. Research firm eMarketer expects the food video industry to be worth more than $12.5 billion in 2017.

"Food videos work much like ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos — both stimulate the brain into pleasure, and the smooth visuals have a healing effect," American writer Dayna Evans once put it. A Tasty video, she said, is worth a one-minute meditation.

Tasty is another food channel Buzzfeed hatched in-house, a year before Worth It. Both sit inside Buzzfeed's video division, but they have different production teams and work in very different ways. What Tasty does best is compress the making of a dish into a polished one- to two-minute — sometimes only a few dozen seconds — sped-up sequence. That short, fast style of food video has been shared virally across social platforms.

It may be no exaggeration to call Tasty Buzzfeed's most successful video venture. According to figures from the online video analytics firm Tubular Labs, Tasty's videos drew 1.1 billion views in June of this year alone, and in some earlier months the number reached 3 billion. By Buzzfeed's account, 50% of Americans watch a Tasty video every month. A company spokesperson said Tasty is Buzzfeed's fastest-growing division by revenue, is already profitable, and makes most of its money from brand sponsorships.

Tasty is cut to fit each social platform. A short video about walnut-pumpkin pasta, for instance, goes up on YouTube first as a 73-second version; the next day a trimmed 65-second cut appears on Facebook. Because Facebook plays videos automatically and without sound, the version posted there drops the voiceover and puts the steps on screen as text.

Facebook's algorithm assumes people would rather stay on Facebook to browse, so Buzzfeed plays along, uploading Tasty videos straight to Facebook instead of bouncing viewers to Buzzfeed's own site when they click. Which is why many people were surprised to learn later that the Tasty channel they saw everywhere was made by Buzzfeed.

Tasty now has nearly 89 million followers on Facebook. "Sliders 4 Ways," a short video showing four ways to make mini burgers, has 200 million views on Facebook alone, and a cheeseburger onion rings tutorial has 160 million.

Sliders 4 Ways

Buzzfeed chief marketing officer Frank Cooper once summed up the reason they work like this: "For starters, there's substance to it. It taps into a simple truth: people love good food, food that reminds them of their childhood, that comforts them, or that reminds them of some experience."

That experience crosses borders. Tasty quickly built out a grid of country channels: Proper Tasty for British food, Tasty Demais for Brazilian, Japanese food on Tasty Japan, Tasty Bien for Spanish-speaking countries, and Einfach Tasty and Tasty Miam for Germany and France. All six international shows are shot in their own languages.

Tasty is filmed entirely indoors. For better results the company has built studios in Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo, and London, each crowded with camera operators and directors lost in the shoot, tables covered with ingredients, everyone staring as the lens sweeps past a pair of hands cracking an egg or spreading sauce.

Employees' children run around the set too, because they are sometimes needed on camera for Tasty Junior, a spin-off with easier recipes. Other spin-offs include Tasty Story, built around famous chefs cooking, and Tasty Happy Hour, which teaches cocktails.

The most important person in all this is the producer, who is responsible for every part of a video, from picking the recipe to shooting and editing it. A producer usually has to turn out one or two 90-second videos a week, taking ideas from recipes seen elsewhere online, from user feedback and comments, and from the view data on earlier videos.

Buzzfeed puts great weight on summing up what has worked before. As soon as it finds a theme or a shooting style that can go off, it copies and refines it fast — which is why you keep seeing cheese, steak, bacon, and pasta in Tasty videos: popular ingredients that viewers can easily get hold of.

Tasty head chef Claire King says that cheese running slowly down a side, or chocolate melting, gives people a feeling of satisfaction just to look at. Every frame magnifies the process; it looks wonderful, and it pulls you in before you notice. So the team works those elements into every video it can, and also cooks inventively, or has a little fun with leftovers.

This may also be where Tasty has the harder job of the two. It is a cooking tutorial, and the overhead shots, brisk background music, and elegant plating that food videos normally rely on aren't enough to make an audience feel it is seeing something new. What matters is what interesting food gets made.

Tasty videos may look much alike at first glance, but the producers keep slipping one or two different elements in to test how viewers react. In May, producer Rie Tange McClenny made a snack called "aquarium cookies": melted homemade candy filling the center of a cookie, a second cookie pressed on top to form a sandwich, a few solid candies tucked inside, bright and playful. That video has been watched 16 million times.

"Aquarium Cookies"

The producers credit its success to how simple the process looks. Rie Tange McClenny found several versions of the aquarium cookie recipe online, then cut steps out to show the easiest one to follow. She also tried opening the video with the finished cookies rather than shooting in chronological order the way Tasty videos always had — if you're making cookies, the first shot is invariably a close-up of flour. Her approach turned out to work.

Tasty now runs like a lab for developing and manufacturing hits. Another good example is the custom cookbook Tasty, released late last year, which sold more than 20,000 copies in its first week. For comparison: making the New York Times bestseller list generally takes at least 25,000 to 30,000 copies over about three months.

The cookbook, which shares the channel's name, is best described as the show's hit piece of merchandise. Tasty lets you pick seven categories of food to go in the book — "best desserts," say, or "addictive avocado," or "spicy Spanish dishes." If you can't decide, the system will decide for you. You can also write a page of your own, up to 300 words, with emoji. It comes as a $35 hardcover or a $24 paperback, and arrives in three to five business days. The cookbook has now sold more than 150,000 copies.

Having got a taste for this, Buzzfeed went further on July 31 this year — Tasty's second anniversary — and launched an induction cooktop, the Tasty One Top. The company brought in veteran experts from General Electric to help design it. Users connect the cooktop over Bluetooth to a new Tasty app on the iPhone, and all 1,700 recipes on the channel can be synced to the One Top, which reads out the cooking steps and adjusts temperature and power by itself. Tasty videos run at too many frames a second for anyone actually trying to cook from them; the cooktop solves that neatly. The Tasty One Top lists at $149 and is expected to ship in November.

Tasty general manager Ashley McCollum told the New York Times: "It was the cookbook's success that made us realize Tasty isn't just an experiment, and it isn't a Facebook page that happens to throw off a lot of ad revenue. What we're looking at is a major IP rooted in the digital age — like making a movie that gets great reviews, and then you start building theme parks and manufacturing every kind of product tied to the brand."

Food is the best subject to start with. Its visual pull can turn, on social platforms, into a connection between people — viewers who feel something share it on — and all the more so now that more and more young people in cities use food to let off stress and treat their loneliness.

That is also why Tastemade, the other American food video company besides Tasty, has been able to grow so fast. It is Tasty's biggest rival, founded in 2012, and it opened its first European office, in London, only this year; the other two are in Los Angeles and São Paulo.

Besides the classic cooking tutorials, Tastemade has a number of signature shows, such as Tiny Kitchen, devoted to making inventive miniature dishes. To stand out in a crowded food video market, Tastemade says it works harder on fine production and on its teams: seven different videos shot a day, each with six dedicated editors, all trying to match the style of the video to the type of show. To look their best on social platforms — Snapchat, for one — those videos are shot vertically. Before the company launched, it also recruited food scouts around the world to find people on Pinterest and Instagram with a talent for food (tastemakers), and talk them into joining Tastemade and bringing their followers with them.

Tiny Kitchen

At the end of 2015 Tastemade raised $40 million in a round led by Goldman Sachs. The company says it now has 100 million monthly active users and more than 1 billion views on its video site.

The market is packed with every other kind of food video too — taste tests, mukbang, tutorials — and they make money mostly from advertising, e-commerce, paid content, and IP development. Once, maybe, watching video while you ate was a private habit of yours alone, a way some people made up for what the meal in front of them lacked. Now food shows may have become a full carnival of entertainment.

As for Buzzfeed, it is clearly no longer content to exist as merely a media company.

Images in this article, including the cover image, come from Buzzfeed, Giphy, the New York Times, Unsplash, Bloomberg, and others.