Thoughts after visiting Food and Hospitality Asia

I just dropped in Food and Hospitality Asia during lunch time on a casual basis and I was blown away by how huge the event was. There are hundreds of booths in there and exhibitors globally from USA, Europe, to Southeast Asian countries and Australia. Everyone has something to sell, be it a food product, from fresh food like rice, vegetables, to processed food like dried food and condiments from a factory. There’s even machinery too. There were some free food samples, but the event is open to only people in this trade. I had to apply and my application had to be reviewed by the organiser. Luckily they allowed me to go in based on my YouTube channel so I’m not just some random public event goer who’s looking to get filled from every free food sample (though I’ve seen people just come and go for the food samples).

From a short stroll around the event, it got me thinking whether the F&B industry is something I want to go into, let alone try. A lot of people have been telling me don’t start an F&B in Singapore. It’s brutal and probably going to get wiped out by either sky high rent, expensive labour or imported food costs. People’s demands are extremely high and even the fittest brands and restaurants struggle. Some high profile closures have sparked debates in the comments section in social media and most upvoted commenters say it’s because of rent from greedy landlords or imported competition from China.

While these challenges paused my ambitions, somehow I still got an itch to try, because if I never try even once, I think I would regret not trying when I’m old. Maybe I would regret either way if or when I try and go bust in a venture. I’m in my 30s now and feel like there’s so many things I have yet to try in life. I see many paths I could take at this junction.

I could do more YouTube and be a full time creator. It sounds crazy and I know many creators don’t make a living based on just YouTube money alone. The more sustainable creators have a business of some product or service, and use YouTube videos to drive traffic to their business. So their financial sustainability comes from the business, not YouTube (well technically they depend almost on YouTube for getting people interested in their business so it could be both). So currently I feel a little naked on this front, as I have a YouTube channel but I don’t have a business (yet). Some brand deals come here and there, but I feel like I’m not going to make a living out of brand deals alone as I’m picky about them and want most of my content to be ad free and rich in value. Even if it’s talking about my business, I still want to make videos that help people learn or experience something for free, so it could be both a soft ad for my business and free content at the same time.

So the goal is to have a business of products or service of some sort, and in my interests, for products, it’s obviously F&B or a food stall or restaurant that people could actually eat food. Products could also be digital products, like a recipe book, or a digital guide teaching people how to cook, or sharing my detailed findings about food. For services, it could be advising brands or other creators about how to make food-related content. That’s mostly digital and knowledge-based work, but it could also be a physical service like offering to shoot a video for them at their premises to share their story.

Every path sounds interesting to me and I really do want to try them all, though not at the same time because I won’t enjoy every dish at the buffet if I tackle them all at once. So I think I should come up with some priority order of which to try first, and I’m listing them down in no particular order of interest (because they’re all interesting to me now and I haven’t really decided which to do first)

1. Physical F&B stall: sounds crazy but I like to build a new food brand and showing the ins and outs of it. Starting from scratch means lots to journey and document lessons along the way. Content is part of the journey but ultimately, preparing and serving food to people is an act of service and the price of food is where value meets customer expectations. I would start by going home-based first since that’s a real stepping stone now to validate if people are really interested in the food that I want to sell. It’s kind of like how the algorithm works on social media too; it shows the content to a few people and if they like it, then the algo shows it to more people. I could try and revise the food concepts a few times until there’s a good chance that many more people could like it. But going into F&B is usually a 2 years commitment as the lease is usually that long and substantial investment is required in machinery and branding stuff to the tune of around $50k to $100k for a decent hawker or coffee shop stall (to at least cover rent of about $3-5k x 12 x 2)

2. Manufacturing food products: if I have a big enough of a YouTube audience, then I could rent factories to make my food products to sell internationally. There’s some element of branding involved too, like how the packaging should look, and I would also have to learn new digital skills like setting up a digital storefront with shopify, but it’s also getting into the regulations of importing and exporting food that’s tricky, since every country has its strict rules. There’s also food expiry to worry about so not selling out fast enough means making a loss, so that’s why brands sell food products near expiry at a discount. I’m still somewhat interested in manufacturing food products, though I wouldn’t go to the extent of setting up a food factory as the startup costs are wild and I’m not really into all the technical stuff of manufacturing regulations.

3. Digital marketing for food brands: this one is interesting to me because I like to make videos, so I could come up with video ideas for other people based on their goals because it’s fun. I use the exact same process for my own videos and generally there are 3 stages of making videos. There’s the idea stage, then the shooting stage, then the editing stage. I’ve been involved from start to end for my own videos and there are so many video ideas on my backlog that I couldn’t digest them all (so technically I need more resources if I want to speed up production i.e. hire video editors and a crew etc). That itself requires substantial investment but it’s kind of hard to find a talent who’s willing to work with me on my crazy ideas. They also like to be paid a handsome sum too, but for around the same price I pay for rent of an F&B space, I could probably only hire 1 good person to work with, and that’s not quite enough maybe.

For each of these options, I could try them out without leaving the safety and comfort of a full time job. I think I should try, learn, and see whether I like it more or not. I probably should stop overthinking it and just try them all anyway, one at a time to give a good genuine attempt.