Hosting a Food Festival Online...
The story of how we pivoted an in-person, fledgling food festival to a digital version
We clearly have festivals on the mind given the post about Waterford Festival of Food in Dungarvan earlier this week, but this whole Grubstack thing taking place this weekend has also piqued our interest with food for thought.
In case you haven’t heard, Grubstack is a video-based virtual food festival streaming live on the Substack app, which began yesterday and continues through to Saturday evening. It is curious, and a little worrying, that a platform which prioritises writing persistently pushes video these days. The line-up is Glastonbury-like, all the heavy hitters of food writing on here. Well, the ones with the biggest subscriber lists, anyway, and the schedule runs the gamut from interviews and discussions to demonstrations and cook-a-longs. There are other official-unofficial events beyond the main line up happening within the ether, too.
Hosting a food festival online is not easy and we can say that with confidence as we almost forgot we’ve done it before.
It’s nearly five years to the day since the first lockdown cast a shadow over Ireland and resigned us all indoors. As a pair who operated digitally for most of our careers we kind of had an upper hand when the pandemic struck and it seemed like everything pivoted from in-person to online. The digital space was already our workspace, not quite digital natives but definitely early digital adapters as a pair in our thirties; so we knew well how to navigate the digital space and use the tools available to our advantage.
The chaos of an unprecedented pandemic made community and connection is so much more important and we knew we had to harness and provide for our community:
We ran a weekly cooking club on Instagram, encouraging people to rediscover the cookbook titles that lay continuously untouched on the shelves at home and actually cook from them while cooped up at home.
We updated a mega directory list of where you could order everything from meal kits to every provisions like milk and bread, direct to your door whilst self-isolating. We covered coast to coast and it even went a bit viral.
We hosted SO MANY live broadcasts, from Instagram lives for Bloom, Bord Bia and Lidl to private corporate cocktail and cookery classes. An unlikely but much-needed source of income when, overnight in March 2020 our income was decimated and what was shaping up to be a successful year saw our calendar wiped clear of all planned opportunities.
Those who know us know we’re Eurovision obsessed but what you might not know is that most Friday nights for about two years we put together an entire Eurovision rewatch on Twitch with a close knit group of about 15 pals. We picked a prior contest, edited it together, made our own graphics, scripted it and commentated it, had our own scoring system and delivered the points like we were hosting a grand final. Every Friday night. We even had cocktail pairings each week and a sort-of after show. We don’t do anything by halves so we took it very seriously, and it kept us linked in with a core group of friends and fellow ESC obsessives and brought us close together, taking collective comfort in something we all love and share.
Then, in May 2020 we hosted a MASSIVE scale version of the above called Éirevision, which was watched by thousands and had spokespeople and interval acts. You can still watch that back here
Going back to food, though, one of our BIGGEST undertakings of the pandemic era did was co-direct Samhain in late 2020. A fledgling food festival in the Boyne Valley region hosted in Kells, it had only juuuust started the year before with a phenomenal debut and big plans for year two… then the pandemic put stop to it. Unprecedented times called for unprecedented action, so we were drafted in fairly late in the game to resuscitate it and make sure it kept going, and it did - as a one-day online festival - that November.
Yes, in the year Eurovision itself was cancelled for the first and only time in its 60+ year history… nothing was going to stop Samhain going ahead.
Again, a slight upper hand put us in the right position at the right time: we had already been brand ambassadors for Boyne Valley Flavours, the local food and drink producer working group which formed much of the organising team of the festival, for a couple of years. So you could say we were semi-insiders and we had the necessary production, broadcast and social media skills to be able to pull off an online pivot.
We co-directed alongside the visionary Olivia Duff, from whose mind Samhain really sprung. We took the lead on the production and technical aspects, but also a heavy hand in the line-up as well as dabbling in the PR and social media ends of things too.
We can be a little disruptive in much of what we put our hands to so we were persistent in challenging the line-up and the subject of sessions. Wherever possible gender balance, representations of diversity, prioritising new speakers instead of inviting back previous ones for the sake of it, making unlikely pairings of personalities or twisting the themes of certain sessions in an unexpected way.
It had chefs, educators, restaurateurs, food historians, food and drink writers, butchers, farmers, dietitians (the late, great Paula Mee, who is much missed), cheesemakers (and ‘mongers), condiment makers and more…
For five continuous hours on a Sunday afternoon we streamed the whole thing on Facebook Live, but it actually wasn’t live. We painstakingly edited pre-recorded conversations together (which sounds like a great idea until you tackle various levels of technical misfirings due to remote self-recordings) to make it go out seamlessly ‘as live’ with all kinds of graphics, split screens, roving ticker, permanent hashtag on screen, holding screens for breaks, mini ‘meet the maker’ intervals between sessions… We even had a Rory O’Connell cookery demonstration, arguably the best in the biz.
It was honestly like a five hour-long magazine show and one of the proudest things we have put our name to in our careers thus far.
Samhain got its rightful second year and instead of conversations about food, food history and culture being housed in venues in a town in Co. Meath, where people had to travel to, they instead happened across the country broadcast in peoples’ own homes. People didn’t need to travel for Samhain, Samhain came to them.
You can re-live the whole Samhain 2020 experience by watching here