Food Porn or How Social Media can help your Restaurant ?

Last night I was at a restaurant that just opened in town. The menu was very well done with high quality graphic design, and the whole communication around the restaurant has been well done. And then I saw it, this girl at the table next to us, taking a picture of her dish to post it on Instagram. This phenomenon is not new and I saw it many times in the past, but it never struck me the way it did last night... The whole restaurant industry is based on Food Porn, from what you see on TV with commercial enhancing the beauty of a steak or a rack of ribs, to the customers sending pictures of their food to friends or to social media. But how and why did this trend happened and how, by using social media can this food porn  help to promote your restaurant?

It was not always like that. Food has always been advertised, but it is just recently that food is turned erotic in commercials (TV, internet, print it doesn't matter). In the center of the food porn idea is the glamorous presentation of a dish. It looks good, it is hot, sexy, juicy and with a low light on it,creating intimacy. That sounds like an adult industry motto, but it's not, it's food. 

And usually food turned into food porn is not the healthiest food you can find. It is pretty complicated to make a broccoli look sexy on camera. You will never make people dream about a chicken soup. But even if it is not sexy, current trend is healthy food.  So how to present regular or high calorie food, how to advertise it and make people buy it even if it is not healthy: you have to create a fantasy, make it look good, feel good and make the customer feel good about eating it. And the solution was food porn. By comparing healthy food to food porn, unhealthy foods stand a chance in the market, by fighting via the presentation and the look of the food rather than comparing nutrition values. This is how the major fast food chains advertise nowadays (as an example here is a commercial from Golden Corral you will see my point, look at this wing dipping into this white dressing...).

Nowadays, food porn took a new turn with the rise of social media because now people share what is on their plate, in a kind of an informal competition to see who eats the best looking food. And food pictures are very popular on Instagram (and then shared to all social media, but it starts here) because of the possibility to add effects to the picture to make it look even better without any knowledge of graphic design. Instagram users share food pictures like people used to share pictures of pin up girls a few decades ago. It is all about sexiness, about food porn.

With this habit of sharing food pictures with your network comes a golden opportunity for restaurant owners to promote their business. People will advertise your restaurant for you by sharing pictures of their food with their friends and family, as long as their dish looks sexy. Restaurant owners should really think about how to turn their food into porn to get more exposure on social media. It is a way to get free advertising from your customers who become an ambassador of your brand, a digital word-of-mouth if you prefer. This path is a good one to explore for anybody who owns a restaurant and wants more exposure. You can even push this trend further by organizing on your social media a food porn contest such as "best picture of Restaurant X food wins a free meal" to increase your audience and push people to maintain your food porn promotion.

But there are two downfalls to this tactic:

First of all the food porn is often linked to "not super healthy" food, so if you use this strategy your restaurant will be categorized as such (not always but often). The second problem of this strategy is it is pretty hard to see a clear return on investment.

To summarize, if you have a restaurant and you need more exposure without a big marketing budget, you definitely should embrace this trend for food porn. Create strong social media profiles (Facebook and Instagram are the two you absolutely need), make your food look like a sexy picture and push people to share it, and then take it EZ.